• As Barack Obama is fond of saying, there can only be one president at a time. And right now, that might as well be Obama himself. While the president-elect is successfully injecting some confidence into the financial markets with a series of well-timed press conferences and leaks designed to unveil his economic team piece by piece, George W. Bush is pardoning turkeys, installing cronies in the federal bureaucracy, and making it easier for polluters to pollute and enrich themselves. Heckuvajob. I don't know why Bush hates our country, but he's certainly letting us know how he truly feels in his final days in office.
• Obama and Joe Biden are heading to Philly next week for a National Governors Association-sponsored event where the president-elect and vice president-elect will meet with governors from both parties and address the effect the economic crisis is having on state budgets. The Wall Street Journal notes that Sarah Palin and Obama will meet for the first time at the event.
• The Minnesota state Canvassing Board has denied a request by the Franken campaign that rejected absentee ballots be included in the recount, even as Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has expressed concern over the sheer volume of challenged ballots by both candidates.
• Sam takes a look at the internal politics of filling Barack Obama's Senate seat in Illinois and navigating the Daley machine.
  
• This weird op-ed in The Washington Post that argues Bill Clinton should take Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. John Quincy Adams went to Congress with lasting effect after losing his presidential reelection bid, the authors insist, so, ipso facto, Clinton could have the same success! It's airtight!
• I hope Newt Gingrich isn't just jerking me around about a 2012 presidential run.
  
• This conservative obsession with the supposed dominance of "The Historic Victimhood Narrative" in public schools (and rewriting history) is both bizarre and morbidly compelling. Yglesias is similarly fascinated, but puts our chosen national heroes in the proper historical context: "Similarly, the much-bemoaned-by-rightwingers greater attention given in recent decades to the contributions of women and ethnic minority groups is about trying to expand the circle of people who feel invested in the national narrative."

--Mori Dinauer

The New York Times is reporting that Mumbai was rocked by a series of terror attacks coordinated over a space of several hours:

NEW DELHI — Coordinated terror attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, Wednesday evening, targeting at least two five-star hotels, the city’s largest commuter train station, a historic movie theater and a hospital.

The state’s highest ranking police official, A.N. Roy, said the attackers, armed with machine guns and grenades, opened fire and disappeared. Local television reported a death toll of 18 at 1 a.m., local time, but some reports estimated the number of deaths to be higher.

No one has claimed responsibility yet, but recently militant groups located in Pakistan have staged attacks in India. Tensions between the two countries have serious implication for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, which has basically been the site of a proxy war between the two nations. Both Pakistan and India are concerned about the consequences of sharing a border with another hostile power. The death toll from the attacks seems to be increasing, with 58 dead according to a report cited from the Agence France-Presse.

--A. Serwer

The results of former South African President Thabo Mbeki's AIDS denialism have been nothing short of devastating to South African citizens, resulting in hundreds of thousands avoiding the kind of treatment that could have kept them alive longer or prevented mothers from passing HIV onto their children:

A new study by Harvard researchers estimates that the South African government would have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people earlier this decade if it had provided antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients and widely administered drugs to help prevent pregnant women from infecting their babies.

The Harvard study concluded that the policies grew out of President Thabo Mbeki’s denial of the well-established scientific consensus about the viral cause of AIDS and the essential role of antiretroviral drugs in treating it.

It's hard to figure out whether to be angry or despondent over something like this, especially since it was only two months ago that Mbeki's health minister, who recommended "garlic, lemon juice and beetroot" as treatments for AIDS, was fired. Mbeki claims that, despite overwhelming scientific proof, the HIV Virus does not cause AIDS. Mbeki's designated successor, Jacob Zuma, appears to accept reality, although he's made some questionable comments himself in the past, suggesting that taking a shower after sex reduces the chances of catching the virus (it doesn't).

In this country though, we have another strain of AIDS denialism exemplified by Dennis Prager. This denialism holds that AIDS is a "gay" problem, and so heterosexuals don't have to worry about it. Prager explains that science, like "the media," is subject to a pervasive liberal bias:

Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a “progressive” end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America -- science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research.

According to the CDC, nearly a third of HIV/AIDS cases diagnosed in 2006 were from high risk heterosexual contact. That is not, by any definition, a "pseudo-threat." The CDC also specifically lists "homophobia" as one of the obstacles to AIDS prevention, and it's easy to see why. If, like Prager, you believe AIDS is something that happens to gay people, then you're more likely to engage in reckless sexual behavior if you're not gay, because, after all, it can't happen to you! It's also easy to see how this kind of thing could result in a denial of one's status and refusal to seek treatment.

As Jesse Taylor pointed out, the desperate need to contradict whatever "liberals" say defies all sense of self-preservation:

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the explanation for every single thing movement conservatives haven’t liked since Reagan. Global warming? Check. Evolution? Check. Labor unions? Check. Underage sex not causing your junk to wither off and die? Check. The Constitution? Check.

-- A. Serwer

Rep. Luis Gutierrez said yesterday that he was asked by Gov. Blagojevich if he'd like to be appointed to Obama's Senate seat, but declined because the governor wanted someone who would run for reelection in 2010. If that's true, it probably rules out Emil Jones as a candidate. Valerie Jarett also seems to have taken herself out of contention. It also probably means Jesse Jackson Jr. has a better shot at the seat than I might have thought. That's because, if Blagojevich did want to pick Guttierrez, it suggests he's looking to shore up support among non-white Democrats for a reelection bid -- support he certainly would need given his abysmal approval ratings (and there aren't any other plausible Latino picks that I know of). For more on the other potential picks, see Adam Doster's piece on the main site.

On an related note, Guttierrez's willingness to serve for two years but no longer is curious, until you consider that Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is up for reelection in 2011. Gutierrez, who is only 54, was, along with Jackson, thought to be a potential mayoral candidate the last time around (2007), but declined to run. If Gutierrez is turning down a seat in the Senate, that seems like pretty good evidence to me that he has already made up his mind to run next time around. A serious challenger would have to make a decision relatively soon given how many candidates for city council he or she would need to recruit. The city council's 50 aldermen currently support Daley almost unanimously, and so, in order to govern effectively, a mayoral candidate would need to recruit and help fund a slate of candidates to run with him. Otherwise, Daley allies would do their best to destroy the new mayor -- even if Daley lost, the Daley machine would remain enormously powerful. Harold Washington, for example, had famously epic fights with the city council.

--Sam Boyd

At Slate, Melinda Henneberger worries that Barack Obama and national Democrats will lose the support of Catholics if they move quickly to pass the Freedom of Choice Act. Catholic hospitals, many of which are located in underserved areas, shouldn't be forced to perform abortions, Henneberger writes, because most of them would rather go out of business. That's a fair enough position to take, and yet there is no evidence that FOCA, as currently written, would do that. The law would simply enshrine Roe v. Wade legislatively, and could coexist with "conscience clauses." Check out Emily Douglas' reporting at RH Reality Check:

Would FOCA do as Hennenberger says - force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions?

Unequivocally no, says Jill Morrison, senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center. Federal conscience clause law, such as the Church Amendment, states that simply receiving public funding does not turn a hospital into a "state actor," Morrison explains. "FOCA must be read consistently with existing federal law, unless the new law explicitly provides that it is intended to repeal existing law."

What's more, there is no evidence that lay Catholics are as incensed about Obama's pro-choice stance as the all-male priesthood and church leadership is. Polls show that, like most Americans, a majority of Catholics believe abortion should remain generally legal. Only about a quarter of Catholics agree with the bishops that all abortions should be outlawed. And 52 percent of Catholic women -- the voters who swung from George W. Bush to Obama -- say they prefer a hospital that provides abortion to one that doesn't.

I think Henneberger has overstated the potential political fall-out of Obama signing FOCA into law. Undoubtedly, religious conservatives and hardened abortion opponents will be outraged. But those aren't the folks who brought Obama to power, and they aren't the folks who'll keep him there if he wins reelection in four years. The only other thing I'd add is that controversy over Catholic hospitals isn't limited to their refusal to perform abortions, which I actually believe is legitimate. Many also do not provide emergency contraception, even to rape victims. Imagine being raped, arriving at the local hospital, and then being told you'll have to go elsewhere if you want pregnancy prevention to be part of your treatment.

--Dana Goldstein

A messy Politico article on the challenge that Russia presents to the Obama administration includes this delightful selection:

But Medvedev's first, hostile move may actually have backed Obama into a corner on the missile system, which is set to be based in Poland and the Czech Republic, said Gary Schmitt, a Russia scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who said he's concerned Russia will take advantage of Obama if he backs away from supporting the system.

"If you decide you're going to pull out of [the missile defense] agreement in any fashion, it won't be seen for policy reasons, it will be seen as a sign of backing down from Moscow," he said. "What's going to matter is how Moscow reads that."

Yes, policy reasons don't matter. The only thing that matters is getting into a pissing contest with Russia. That's how we won, um, the Iraq war? Wait, has that strategy ever been successful? But indeed the initial negative Russian response has blown over and it's likely there will be some positive ground to make up through work on other issues like Iran's nuclear weapons program.

One other great thing about this article: "Obama enters office signaling that he will continue the policies of President Bush's late second term in Iraq." No, he doesn't. Indeed, he's entering promising to withdraw from Iraq within something like16 months, a choice the current president vehemently opposes. If there are any similarities between Obama's policies and Bush's, it will only be because actors like the Iraqi government forced Bush into certain deals, like the Status of Forces Agreement, in part because of signals received from Obama.

--Tim Fernholz

Apparently, the central strategy of the Obama transition team is to simply continue having press conferences dribbling out economic appointees and watching the markets bounce. He's either going to be hitting Dow 36,000 in two weeks with the Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of the Treasury or make a gaffe that ends in post-depression dystopia. Well, actually, he's going to announce his national security team after the holidays, but a man can dream, right?

More seriously, I had been feeling a little sorry for Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama's earliest and most impressive economic advisers, Canada-related gaffes not withstanding. He hadn't yet landed any of the high-profile economic advisory positions that many expected him to step into. Today, we learn that he's getting a whole council! Sort of. The president-elect announced the creation of a President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which will be chaired by former Fed Chair Paul Volcker and have Goolsbee as it's staff director and Chief Economist. Goolsbee will also be one of Obama's three nominees to the Council of Economic Advisers. Volcker, who is 81, will likely present the public face of the council while Goolsbee handles the heavy lifting.

Why a new council? Cue the president-elect's remarks...

[T]his Board is modeled on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by President Eisenhower to provide rigorous analysis and vigorous oversight of our intelligence community by individuals outside of government – individuals who would be candid and unsparing in their assessment. This new board will perform a similar function for my Administration as we formulate our economic policy.

The Board will be composed of distinguished individuals from diverse backgrounds outside of government – from business, labor, academia and other areas – who will bring to bear their wisdom and expertise on the formulation, implementation and evaluation of my Administration’s economic recovery plan. The Board will report regularly to me, Vice President-Elect Biden and our economic team as we seek to jump-start economic growth, create jobs, raise wages, address our housing crisis and stabilize our financial markets.

The reality is that sometimes policymaking in Washington can become too insular. The walls of the echo chamber can sometimes keep out fresh voices and new ways of thinking – and those who serve in Washington don’t always have a ground-level sense of which programs and policies are working for people, and which aren’t. This board will provide that perspective to me and my Administration, with an infusion of ideas from across the country and from all sectors of our economy – input that will be informed by members’ first-hand observations of how our efforts are impacting the daily lives of our families.

I'm skeptical of the need for another advisory council within the White House, especially one that already has a policy-coordinating council (Larry Summer's National Economics Council) and an advisory economics council (Christina Romer's Council of Economic Advisors). On the other hand, getting more intelligent people involved in the policy conversation is on balance a good idea. But I've also understood that the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board as kind of a late-career holding pen for officials in need of a little perk. For instance, did you know Iraq war opponent Brent Scowcroft chaired the board during the launch of the Iraq war, or that the current occupant is someone named Stephen Friedman? So if this new institution is modeled on the current FIAB, I hope it's given some more teeth.

--Tim Fernholz

Spencer takes a look at five sub-cabinet positions that will exercise important influence on the Obama administration's foreign policy. From the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities to the director for the Middle East on the National Security Council, these are the people who will have great behind-the-scenes influences on foreign policy decision making. Consider the position of ambassador to Iraq, the on-the-ground manager for the political process that will underlie the president-elect's plan to withdraw from Iraq:

[T]here isn’t a stable national or sectarian consensus about the composition of the Iraqi government. Crucial -- even existential -- questions remain about how much power should be concentrated in Baghdad; whether and how the Shiite-led government could absorb tens of thousands of the mostly-Sunni militiamen known as the Sons of Iraq, and who will govern large areas in northern Iraq claimed by both Arabs and Kurds. If that isn’t enough, the so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the U.S. and Iraqi governments demands that the U.S. military withdraw from cities and large towns by mid-2009 and gives the Iraqi government wide latitude over U.S. military operations.

All of which means that whomever succeeds Amb. Ryan Crocker at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad will have a task unlike any of his or her predecessors. The next ambassador has to “assess the situation accurately to let withdrawal proceed as expeditiously as possible without causing more problems than it solves,” said Daniel Serwer, a former State Dept. official who is now a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Thanks to the SOFA, the U.S.’s strategic mission in Iraq has been recast from victory to extrication. Managing withdrawal in all its dimensions -- coordination with the military, with the Iraqi government, with the region and with the White House -- has to be job No. 1.

“There are so many different directions this person need be superb in,” Serwer said. “Handling the military, assessing the situation in Iraq and developing good rapport with the Iraqis, see[ing] around the next corner if things are going off the rails. It’s a tremendous challenge.”

That’s especially true if the Obama administration tries to broker a pan-sectarian compact for a post-U.S. Iraq. If that’s the case, the next ambassador might look like an imperial viceroy — even as the U.S. exits the country.

Go read the whole thing.

-- Tim Fernholz

P.S. Daniel Serwer? Where have I heard that last name before ...

Brentin Mock talks to the Rev. Lennox Yearwood about race, the environment, and politics:

You presented at this year's Green Festivals. Did you expect many from the hip-hop generation to be there?

I expected to see some people from the hip-hop generation. I don't think it's going to be the majority of the crowd. What's been disheartening is over the past four years, I would go to the immigration rallies, and there'd be all brown people there. I'd go to police-brutality rallies, and it'd be all black people. I'd go to green or environmental or climate rallies, and it'd be all white.

Matthew Yglesias explains how to repair our relationship with Europe:

What's more, though, to some pundits like Robert Kagan, Europe is defined primarily by its military weakness. But the reality is that two of the top five, and four of the top 10 military spenders in the world are in Western Europe. By the same token, two of the world's eight nuclear powers and two of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are in Europe. To be sure, these two are, in both cases, the United Kingdom and France. Still, that reflects that, aside from the United States itself, the only countries with real capacity to project military power at a distance are not erstwhile rivals like Russia and China or pseudo-menaces like Iran but are the U.K. and France. This, combined with America's historic ties to these powers, makes our position in the world secure. Plus, the sheer weight of the U.S. and the EU means that the U.S.-European relationship sets the tone for our bilateral relationships with other advanced democracies, including Japan, Canada, South Korea, and Australia

And Sarah Posner looks back at the biggest stories she has covered since the beginning of her FundamentaList column last year:

The FundamentaList launched in September 2007 with a question that would recur throughout the presidential campaign: Out of the field of GOP presidential hopefuls, whom would James Dobson endorse?

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

Under the Bush administration, record numbers of gay and lesbian service members have been discharged due to their sexual identity, even those in crucial jobs such as translating Arabic into English. Considering the discrimination inherent to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the pressing military and intelligence needs of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, shouldn't DADT be quickly repealed by the Obama administration?

That's Andrew Sullivan's position, and I'd certainly like to believe that an immediate DADT repeal would be politically feasible. Sure, the issue was a disaster for Bill Clinton in 1993, but today's America is quite different when it comes to acceptance of homosexuality; according to one poll, 75 percent of Americans now support the rights of gays to serve in the military.

Yet tackling the issue in the midst of two wars will be delicate, and there are conflicting reports on whether the Obama team plans on delaying the repeal of DADT until 2010, as the Washington Times reported last week. Yesterday the Washington Blade, a gay and lesbian paper, reported that the transition team was downplaying the Washington Times piece and saying no decision will be made on DADT until a full defense team is in place. But even Rep. Barney Frank, who is gay, is urging caution, telling the Blade that it would be wiser to put off dealing with DADT until after the troops return from Iraq.

That may be pragmatic, but it'll be little comfort to the LGBT troops risking their lives in the field right now. Just a reminder of the many tensions that are sure to play out between the incoming administration and various progressive interest groups.

--Dana Goldstein

• We now have a price tag to go along with Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats' economic stimulus package: $500 billion over two years. Not to be outdone on the policy front, John Boehner wants to eliminate the capital gains tax, John Taylor wants to make tax-cutting a "permanent" policy, and Grover Norquist believes that "the economy is in the present state because when the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006 you knew those tax increases were going to come in 2010." Oh, and remember that $350 billion Hank Paulson was going to leave for the incoming Obama administration? Turns out ol' Hank wants it back. Now that's some leadership!
• While most of the Republican party remains mired in supply-side fantasyland, some conservatives are at least attempting to move on. James Joyner recommends that the Right needs new public intellectuals, John Derbyshire starts up a "Secular Right" blog, and Jose Antonio Vargas profiles the efforts of Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn to build up the "rightroots."
• Hillary Clinton's appointment as Secretary of State could be barred by the Constitution's explicit ban on Senators or Representatives being appointed to civil office if that office's emoluments (salary) was increased during the Senator or Representative's time in Congress. The traditional "Saxbe fix," however, is simply to reduce the compensation for the civil office to its previous amount.
• I think Karl Rove missed his true calling as a groundbreaking stand-up comic when he decided to cash in on the pundits' talking heads circuit: "Well, at least in the White House I was in, policy won out, but you had to be aware of the political fallout of what you were going to do in order to contain it and deal with it. You bet. But to -- but first and foremost if -- the president I worked for, George W. Bush said, you know what, let’s do right, and the politics will take care of itself."
• Whatever small steps conservatives are taking to retool are hardly being replicated by libertarians, however. Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch spend 3757 words -- half of which is focused on the 1970s -- arguing that America now stands at the precipice of a new libertarian era of "hyper-individualized" freedom. Not to be a wet blanket on these utopian dreams, but aren't a lot of our public policy problems the very product of hyper-individualism?
• George Bush issued 14 pardons and commuted the sentences of two individuals yesterday, though none are controversial. Slate has a handy list of other possible contenders for the liberating power of Bush's pen.
• Freedom's Watch, the conservative advocacy group that was all bark and no bite this election season, is closing up shop after spending $30 million on television and radio ads in the general election. I tell you, they sure don't make billionaire right-wing philanthropists the way they used to.
• And finally, the Campaign Finance Institute takes a look at Barack Obama's fundraising and concludes that "After a more thorough analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), it has become clear that repeaters and large donors were even more important for Obama than we or other analysts had fully appreciated." In other words, Obama mastered the art of getting people to repeatedly open their wallets for successively bigger amounts.

--Mori Dinauer

Three new appointments for Joe Biden's office. To anyone who thinks these folks won't be important, I have two words: David Addington. To wit:

Counselor to the Vice President: Mike Donilon

Domestic Policy Advisor to the Vice President: Terrell McSweeny

Assistant to the Vice President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Liaison: Evan Ryan

Donilon is a long-time political adviser to Biden and numerous other Democratic candidates; it seems his role will be providing communications and strategy suggestions to the Veep's team. McSweeny has done policy work for Biden on both the campaign trail and in the Senate, and previously worked on domestic issues for Wes Clark and Al Gore. Ryan was Hillary Clinton's scheduler in the White House and her first Senate campaign; she has since gone on to work for Biden and John Kerry as well as at the Clinton Gobal Initiative.

--Tim Fernholz

Jennifer Senior has an interesting New York feature on cities and "loneliness" -- or why new social science research shows that urban dwellers are less likely to be lonely than people living in suburban, exurban, or rural areas. Cities, Senior writes, foster friendships by allowing individuals to meet more new people and giving them more interesting activities to do. Similarly, urban living helps marriages by providing couples with new stimuli -- essentially preventing them from "falling into a rut." This is all despite that fact that far more people live alone in cities; in New York, an astounding one in three households contains just one individual.

Senior sets up her piece as a foil to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, the 2000 book that argued Americans are more socially atomized than ever before, eschewing clubs, games, church groups, and other activities that once defined adult social life. To be sure, Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, is a pessimist, and his conceptions of social activity in Bowling Alone were limited. But Senior ignores Putnam's more recent work, which raises, I think, a much more pressing concern about urban life. In a study of 30,000 people across the country, Putnam found that Americans living in more diverse communities -- cities, in most cases -- are far more likely to have negative views of people racially and socioeconomically different from themselves. So while urban dwellers may be less lonely and have a larger social circle, they are, in many cases, distrustful of difference, and so are choosing to socialize with people much like themselves.

We saw the effects of this trend during the Democratic party, when white voters in some heavily white states, such as Iowa and Minnesota, were far more sympathetic to Barack Obama than white voters in states with larger black populations, such as Missouri and Pennsylvania. Many of those same voters turned around and voted for Obama in the general election, but the trend is disturbing nonetheless, and worthy of further study.

--Dana Goldstein

Via First Read, it looks like John Brennan won't be head of the CIA after all, possibly because of questions raised about his positions on torture and extraordinary rendition. Brennan is unequivocal about withdrawing his name for any potential role in the intelligence apparatus of the new administration, writing, "I respectfully ask that my name be withdrawn from consideration for a position within the Intelligence Community." Earlier in the letter, he answers his critics:

It has been immaterial to the critics that I have been a strong opponent of many of the policies of the Bush Administration such as the preemptive war in Iraq and coercive interrogation tactics, to include waterboarding. The fact that I was not involved in the decisionmaking process for any of these controversial policies and actions has been ignored. Indeed, my criticism of these policies within government circles was the reason why I was twice considered for more senior level positions in the current Administration only to be rebuffed by the White House.

As I said before, Brennan seemed to subscribe the the big picture of Obama's foreign policy approach, even if in the past he seemed to support many of the controversial policies Obama had promised to end, precisely because they undermine that approach. The question is, now that Brennan has withdrawn, whether Obama can find a candidate to head the CIA who will have similar credibility in intra-agency circles, reflects Obama's own beliefs about foreign policy, and has actively opposed "enhanced interrogation" and extraordinary rendition. Given how little we've heard about alternatives to Brennan, this may be exceedingly difficult.

-- A. Serwer

In celebration of a very Thankful week, here is the latest in the military's approach to foreign policy, government lying, Latin American diplomacy and defense budget wonkery.

• Think big, USCENTCOM [PDF]. In a Center for Strategic and International Studies report, Anthony Cordesman outlines a plan for USCENTCOM to broadly restructure its approach to the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia during the forthcoming departure from Iraq. Diplomacy and foreign aid should be accompanied by a re-posturing of U.S. military so that troops are working alongside allies in the region rather than in their stead. Even more importantly, we must solicit local support to address the root causes of terrorism by altering our rhetoric for the "War on Terror" so that it is no longer perceived as anti-Arab or anti-Muslim. Cordesman concludes with a recommendation based on the lessons of Iraq: Maintain a presence in the region, but don't over commit and get dragged into another 21st Century "great game." -- SW
• The U.S. Ministry of Truth. Professors from The University of Illinois' Cline Center for Democracy have released a study demonstrating that the factual content of several White House press releases detailing the composition of the Coalition of the Willing were revised and backdated in ways that made the updated documents appear original. From 2003 to 2005, continuing long after the invasion had ended, surreptitious alterations to the apparent number and names of the countries comprising the coalition were made, but the documents retained their original release dates and were presented as unedited lists. In some cases, earlier lists were simply removed from public record. Historians will need to tread carefully when assessing the legacy of this administration, which will have left behind specious documentation of its Iraq invasion. -- DH
• Linchpin diplomacy. Yesterday, Brookings rolled out its Latin America policy ideas, advising the Obama administration to work with the region's countries as partners. While large asymmetries endure between the U.S. and its neighbors, Brookings argues the western hemisphere can work together as an "America's Eight," modeled after the Group of Eight, without the U.S. dictating goals and programs. This will work because Latin America has changed: Countries in the region rely less on funds from development banks and are now more competitive in international markets. They have also matured politically and diplomatically, opening new embassies and leading international forums. If the region takes a downturn, the U.S., conversely, will feel the pressure of its widespread poverty and an increase drug crime. -- CP
• Strategy and the defense budget. This extensive report from a number of Pentagon insiders closely examines the relationship between defense budgets and defense strategy, and -- surprise! -- the two don't add up. With some of the highest defense budgets ever -- higher even than in World War II -- the United States has fewer combat brigades, airplanes and ships. It also explores the danger of having our defense priority be a military capable of defeating China and Russia, since any war with one of those states would have disastrous repercussions on the entire world -- meaning that even planning to fight such a war is planning to fail. Read the whole thing, especially in light of the defense budget fights predicted for the early days of the Obama administration. -- TF
  

-- TAP Staff

PREVIOUS ROUND-UPS:
11/18/08
11/12/08

In case you missed it over the weekend, we ran a piece from our November issue by health care expert Harold Pollack, explaining how, even though he's an expert, when it came time to manage his wife's care, he didn't make all the right choices:

Several people made mistakes in Veronica's care. The worst and most deadly mistake was ours: going to this urgent-care center. Veronica's symptoms demanded a 911 call. I knew better -- or I certainly should have. I am a certified expert, director of the University of Chicago Center for Health Administration Studies. I've served on expert panels of the Institute of Medicine, no less.

I was swayed to discount what was happening --Veronica, a clinical nurse specialist, was, too -- by disbelief, by her recent illness, and by her general fitness. We were also swayed by the expected hassle and expense of an ER visit. We envisioned paying a large bill to be prescribed some Tums. Last year, Veronica went out-of-network for urgent care. That cost $700.

In part, we hesitated because that was exactly what the modern health-insurance system is designed to make us do. A quarter-century ago, the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE) established the basic argument for deductibles and co-payments in insurance. HIE remains the most important policy experiment in American history. Its most potent finding was that people who got free care used 40 percent more services than did others assigned to cost-sharing plans. Yet the free care produced little measurable additional benefit for the average patient. These results are often cited in support of co-payments and deductibles designed to discourage inappropriate care. Policy-makers and payers are particularly concerned about the real and alleged over-use of emergency care. Charging higher co-payments is one obvious response.

--The Editors

Via Megan Carpentier, Patricia Meisol has a very interesting article about the small number of medical practitioners who choose to become abortion providers. One factor is the fact that the skills are not easily acquired at many medical schools. ("Even in Maryland, where about 61 percent of voters approved a referendum guaranteeing abortion in 1992 and which has the fourth-highest abortion rate in the country, abortion is not taught in any formal lectures at the state's flagship medical school.") Another important factor is the lingering effects of the terrorism directed at abortion clinics in the 80s and 90s:

Regardless of specialty, doctors who perform abortions sign up for a lifestyle unlike any other in medicine, a subculture replete with drawn blinds, shredders, and security guards at professional conventions. Violence against abortion providers has declined markedly since the 1980s and '90s, when several doctors were killed or injured in shootings across the country and scores of clinics were torched or bombed, according to abortion federation data.

Myron Rose, a longtime College Park abortion provider who spoke at the seminar Lesley attended, wept as he described the difficult search for new office space after his clinic was firebombed in 1984. But that, he assured Lesley and the other medical students, was "antique times."

Even so, those involved with abortion remain extremely cautious. Doctors take cover in the anonymity of large hospitals and debate whether to take their spouses' surnames and how best to protect their children. Some avoid speaking publicly about abortion.

--Scott Lemieux

Ann Friedman argues that we shouldn't describe the debate over gay marriage as part of the culture wars:

We'll continue to lose until we can successfully relabel LGBT rights a civil-rights issue situated firmly within the context of other civil-rights struggles, not an issue mired in the culture-war swamp of moral controversy. (To a lesser degree, the same goes for abortion rights.) "Culture" implies we are comfortable with different parts of our country and different groups of people seeing this issue differently. It implies that there is no absolute right or wrong -- just two sparring factions -- and that we'll simply have to wait for the rest of the country to come around. Culture changes slowly. This is something I've heard a lot in the wake of the passage of California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. "History is on our side! Don't worry, the demographic trends are with us!"

Paul Waldman points out that conservative talk radio and TV hosts are going to have a lot more to complain about in the next few years:

Over the last eight years, many conservatives, particularly the radio and television hosts who enjoy such loud and lucrative megaphones, have been forced to navigate some difficult rhetorical waters. When your side controls the White House, the Congress (as it did until two years ago), the judiciary, and the business world, how do you argue that you're part of an oppressed group being held down by The Man? It isn't easy, but they did it nonetheless. The "elite" they bellowed at day after day is not those who actually hold power. It's obscure college professors, Hollywood actors, the city council of a town you don't live in, and nonprofit organizations who advocate for things like poor people or the environment or civil liberties. That's the source of your problems, they would say, and that's who you should be mad at.

And Gershom Gorenberg writes about a house in Hebron that has become the lastest flashpoint in the debate over Israeli settlements in the West Bank:

The House of Dispute is a long, rectangular, four-story building on the east edge of Hebron. The street-level rooms are built as storefronts, facing the road leading to the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba. Upstairs are living quarters. As I write, the people living in those quarters are settlers who moved in one night in March of last year.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

One of the problems with the Department of Education is that at the nuts and bolts level of how schools are funded and how curricula are made, the United States doesn't actually have a commitment to a strong federal role in education. But because federal dollars for K-12 are targeted toward disadvantaged students -- and because no school district wants to forgo the average 9 percent of their funding that comes from the feds -- there are ways for Washington to apply pressure without radically overhauling the system. That's what No Child Left Behind did. And as the Post reports, a central challenge for the Obama administration will be correcting the failures of NCLB without conceding that there shouldn't be a strong federal role in education.

After all, pressure and coordination from Washington would ensure quicker and, probably, more effective progress on any number of crucial education issues: equalizing funding between poor and affluent school districts; developing standards for teacher quality; and encouraging states to come together to create curricula and tests that truly prepare students for college and the job market. At the higher education level, the DOE should champion a move to direct lending between government and students, cutting out the often corrupt for-profit middlemen. And the department should take a more active interest in the low college graduation rates of low-income students.

Another job for the DOE will be implementing the key higher ed promise of Obama's campaign -- a program that would provide all students with two-thirds of the cost of their college education in exchange for community service. Obama should be held accountable on this.

--Dana Goldstein

Apparently, CNN was forced to rehire more than a hundred workers it had fired for being part of a union:

This report likely won’t be on CNN’s “Headline News,” but after five years, former workers at CNN have finally gained justice. In a decision made public today, an administrative law judge ordered the network to rehire 110 workers who were fired because they were union members. CNN also was ordered to recognize the workers’ unions, National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians-CWA (NABET-CWA) locals 31 and 11.

Judge Arthur Amchan found that CNN violated the rights of more than 250 employees at the network’s bureaus in Washington, D.C., and New York City when it ended its subcontract with Team Video Services (TVS), whose employees were represented by NABET-CWA. He also ruled that CNN discriminated against TVS employees who wanted to continue working at CNN’s bureaus to avoid having to recognize and bargain with the union.

This apparently hasn't been reported on CNN, which really calls into question its ability as a news network to report objectively on issues that affect its financial interests, like say card check legislation or legislation designed to prevent companies from firing or intimidating their employees for trying to form a union.

-- A. Serwer

On the heels of an open letter from a group of psychiatrists advocating against the potential nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA, Spencer Ackerman pushes back, pointing out that the group has taken several of the quotes it uses out of context:

The psychiatric coalition is implying that Brennan means to preserve the Bush torture regime. What he means — and what you often hear from longtime officials across the national-security apparatus — is that there are downsides to ripping everything up impulsively: people don’t know what the rules are. And that’s hardly a problem for Barack Obama alone: something that really, really bothered CIA about the so-called Dark Side is that operatives didn’t know if they’d be prosecuted for doing things that the Bush administration wanted. I suppose you could rejoinder that we don’t want someone who loses the moral forest for the bureaucratic trees. But if there’s going to be someone to get the CIA out of the torture business, it’ll probably need to be someone who understands the internal culture of the agency.

Finally, I’ve done a fair amount of reporting over the years into the intelligence community and torture. And Brennan’s name has simply not come up in any significant way. I just did a quick refresher into some of the best investigative reporting on the subject — Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side,” Ron Suskind’s “The One Percent Doctrine,” Bart Gellman’s “Angler,” and Jim Risen’s “State of War” — and Brennan isn’t linked to torture in any of them. Neither does George Tenet’s memoir portray Brennan as having anything to do with interrogation policy.

That said, I think there has been a tendency in liberal circles to completely ignore the boss' line on this. Obama has said he is against torture, his likely AG Eric Holder nominee is against torture, and likely National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones is against torture. Some of us also tend to ignore the possibility that Brennan was picked for reasons other than his past defense of some of our more reprehensible policies. Reading this interview, it starts to become clear why Obama has taken a shine to Brennan:

I think that what we need in our quiver are many different types of arrows. We certainly need to have a military arrow. We need to have an intelligence one. But we need to have a diplomatic one. We need to have foreign aid. There needs to be a comprehensive set of approaches. A lot of these issues, including counterterrorism, cannot be solved with kinetic force.

I am a strong proponent of trying to focus more of our efforts on the upstream phenomenon of terrorism. I make the analogy to pollution. We learned that pollutants kill us when they get into the water we drink or the fish we eat or the air we breathe. But I think we also learned that we have to go upstream to identify and eliminate those sources of pollution. Terrorism is a tactic, and we have to be more focused upstream. Since 9/11, understandably we've focused downstream, on those terrorists who might be in our midst or trying to kill us, the operators. I think there needs to be much more attention paid to those upstream factors and conditions that spawn terrorists.

As Ackerman previously reported for TAP, one of the central tenets of Obama foreign policy doctrine is "draining the swamp," eliminating the social causes of terrorism, not simply eliminating the terrorists themselves through military means. Brennan would seem to agree, at least in principle, with designing a foreign policy "to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root." Viewed in this context, Obama's affinity for Brennan seems more understandable. The problem is that implementing the Obama Doctrine is impossible as long as the dark side is how we do business, and it's not clear that Brennan himself as realized that.

Greg Mankiw is a widely well-regarded economist, and I am neither well regarded nor an economist, but he seems to be willfully misunderstanding the new administration's stimulus plans in order to make a snarky point:

"Facing an increasingly ominous economic outlook, President-elect Barack Obama and other Democrats are rapidly ratcheting up plans for a massive fiscal stimulus program that could total as much as $700 billion over the next two years. ... Obama has set a goal of creating or preserving 2.5 million jobs by 2011."

Dividing one number by the other, that works out to $280,000 per job.

What is going on here? Logically, it must be one of three possibilities:

1. The fiscal stimulus is going to be much smaller than is being reported.
2. The new administration is setting a low bar for itself when it comes to job creation.
3. The Obama team believes in very small fiscal policy multipliers.

Let me amplify the last point with a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation. The average weekly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers is about $600, or about $60,000 over a two-year period. Granted, labor income is only about two-thirds of national income, and we have to add a few supervisors into the mix. So let's say each job created means $100,000 of extra national income. If we are generating $100,000 of income with $280,000 of government spending, the multiplier is only 100/280, or 0.36. By contrast, traditional Keynesian models suggest a multiplier closer to 2.0.

Or it could mean that not all of the stimulus package is focused directly on job creation. Which, in fact, it likely will not be, since most economists I've spoken to and many reports I've read predict that a big chunk of the stimulus -- tens of billions of dollars -- will include increased funding for things like food stamps, TANF, and unemployment insurance. It will likely also include federal aid to states, much of which will be used to make up massive budget shortfalls on programs like medicaidare. While that aid doesn't directly create jobs, without it, states would have been firing public employees to balance their budgets, especially with the bond market as tight as it is.

None of those facets of the stimulus program directly create jobs, but they ease the pain for the millions of people losing jobs, preventing them from falling into deep poverty while the economy returns to course, and stimulate the economy in the aggregate. Subtracting the cost of these kinds of aid from the total cost of the stimulus will probably make the cost-per-job figure seem more reasonable.

On another note, Mankiw says that the fiscal policy multipliers are too small -- that is, I presume, the assumed effects of each stimulus dollar in relation to economic growth don't seem worthwhile. Presumably he knows this better than I, but I'm confused because of this chart which has appeared in various forms in most discussions of future stimulus packages. It purports to tell us the economic benefit for each dollar spent through various economic policy mechanisms. The largest multiplier it offers is .58, for increasing food stamps; nothing approaches the 2.0 multiplier that Mankiw suggests is appropriate. Either Mankiw is talking about something different from what Mark Zandi, the creator of the chart, is trying to explain, and I just don't get it, or one of them is wrong about what kind of fiscal policy multipliers we should expect from the stimulus. I'll look into it.

--Tim Fernholz

Delaware's governor has announced whom she will appoint to replace Vice President-elect Joe Biden in the Senate when he resigns sometime before the start of his term on January 6: Ted Kaufman, a longtime senior aide to Biden, who will stay in the seat until a 2010 special election that he will not participate in. The move has been criticized in Delaware by those who think it is an attempt to pave the way for Biden's son, Beau, to win the seat. Beau Biden, Delaware's Attorney General, is in the process of being deployed to Iraq with the National Guard and so cannot be appointed now. But judging by this Politico article, a good chunk of Delaware's political establishment was hoping that Lt. Governor John Carney, who lost bid for governor this year, would end up in the seat.

I can understand why people are upset about Carney. But I still think the appointment choice was solid, for two reasons: One, it reflects voter preference -- they clearly want someone along Joe Biden's line, so choosing his longtime adviser gives them that. Two, as Kaufman recognizes, anyone appointed now who wants to stay in the seat is going to need to be campaigning for the next two years. Better to have a caretaker seat to handle Senate business and let the potential replacements do the politcal work on their own time. But no doubt the dynamics of a 2010 Senate campaign featuring the vice president's son will create some interesting political choices for the Obama administration.

--Tim Fernholz

• The Obama economic team took shape today, and over the weekend Obama laid out the economic recovery plan his administration will pursue. Meanwhile, The Democrat-led 111th Congress, which convenes on January 6, plans to prepare economic recovery legislation in time for Obama's signature on Inauguration Day two weeks later. Finally, the incoming administration seems adverse to repealing the Bush tax cuts, signaling instead that it will simply let them sunset in 2011.
• On the foreign policy front, Susan Rice appears to be headed for Ambassador to the United Nations and The New York Times highlights the caveats behind the Hillary Clinton selection: "By this past Thursday, when Mr. Obama reassured Mrs. Clinton that as secretary of state she would have direct access to him and could select her own staff, the wooing was complete." Meanwhile, Adam looks at Michael Isikoff's Newsweek story on whether Obama will appoint a 9/11-style commission on the Bush administration's use of torture in acquiring terrorism intel, and The Wall Street Journal draws a link between the emerging Obama foreign policy cabinet and proteges of Brent Scowcroft.
• Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner has announced that she will name Ted Kaufman as Joe Biden's replacement until a special election can be held in 2010. Kaufman is a longtime advsier to Biden, and the pick is thought to leave the seat warm for Beau Biden, currently on a tour of duty in Iraq.
• The Minnesota recount continues to confirm a close race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken, with the former leading by 180 votes as of this writing. Nate Silver is bolder, predicting (with some caveats) that Franken will prevail by just 27 votes when every ballot has been recounted.
• Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal gave a speech Saturday night at the Iowa Family Policy Center annual fundraiser, fueling speculation that the GOP rising star is poising himself for a presidential run in four years. Now, I'll be the first to admit that Jindal is probably the most dynamic figure in the GOP today, but that in no small part has to do with the fact that Jindal isn't politically clumsy -- he isn't going to run in 2012 if the Obama administration is perceived successful in its fourth year, just as he knew it would be political suicide to jump on the McCain ticket this year.
• In other Republican news, South Carolina GOP chair Katon Dawson has thrown his hat in the ring to succeed Mike Duncan as RNC chair. Greg Sargent reminds us that Dawson initially attracted attention back in September when he was forced to resign from a country club that had a whites-only policy. Sounds like just the right man to lead a party which looks less like the future and more like fellow Palmetto-stater and dixiecrat bigot Strom Thurman.
• The Washington Post takes a look at some of the sleazy criminals looking to get a presidential pardon from outgoing president-in-name-only George W. Bush, including fraudster and junk-bond peddler Michael Milken and Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.).
• After getting smacked down by Paul Krugman last week, George Will decides to appear on the same program to repeat the very same lie about the New Deal on This Week yesterday. "Before we go into a new New Deal, can we just acknowledge that the first New Deal didn’t work?," Will proclaimed in his inimitable, condescending tone. Unfortunately, Krugman wasn't around to challenge the lie and the rest of the panel simply deferred to Will. Now that's punditry you can believe in.
  

--Mori Dinauer

The Citi bailout plan is incredibly depressing -- another equity injection, and staggered responsibility for hundreds of billions of dollars in Citi assets. Not because the government didn't need to rescue the institutions, but because it seems to have been done with very little attention to the political optics, with very little transparency, and with very few restrictions on management and investors that could prevent taxpayer money from being abused. The future Obama Treasury team will hopefully approach these issues with a little more attention to all three of those criteria in mind. In the meantime, we can hope that not too much money will be lost on this little exercise.

The good news is that there were prohibitions on issuing dividends and a high interest rate on the government loan. The bad news is that there were no management changes, although Felix Salmon thinks CEO Vikram Pandit will be forced out by stockholders. See Robert Reich for more; it's also interesting to note that Bob Kuttner favorite Sheila Bair was apparently the prime mover behind the structuring of the Citi bailout.

--Tim Fernholz

I just caught this Today show interview between Matt Lauer and Carla Bruni Sarkozy, France's first lady. And while it's interesting to see just how different Carla, a singer-songwriter and former model, is from any American first lady ever, in some ways she is similar. For example, she'll express feminist principles, but decries feminism: "Usually first ladies have been supporting their husbands ... but when I met my husband, which was only a year ago, I had a previous life. And so I thought I'd keep [my job as a performer]. ... And I thought maybe for a woman nowadays, it's important to have a job, you know, and to keep it. It's not that I'm such a feminist." Watch the whole thing:

--Dana Goldstein

I'm working on a longer piece on what the potential Clinton appointment to Secretary of State means, but I wanted to note one thing that Matt Yglesias pointed out:

This idea that a relatively small disagreement about diplomacy with Iran was their only disagreement during the primaries is widespread, but strikes me as something of a mutually convenient myth. The Iran thing really was an example of an issue where the disagreement seemed to generate more heat than light. But they had a related, and more clear-cut, disagreement about Cuba policy with Obama indicating a desire to soften the hard line that prevailed through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations while Clinton indicated a desire to stick with the status quo. Obama wholeheartedly embraced the Shultz/Perry/Kissinger/Nunn nuclear disarmament agenda while Clinton was more equivocal. Obama implicitly criticized the Clinton administration for waiting until its waning days to really buckle down on the Arab-Israeli conflict. They disagreed about whether the US should join the international treaty to ban cluster bombs.

Matt notes that there is a trend here, but doesn't identify it. I'll take a stab: The difference is Obama is more willing than Clinton to ignore foreign policy orthodoxies based on domestic political considerations. Iran negotiations? Don't want to cede hawkishness to the right and have to worry about the Israel factor. Same thing with the cluster bomb treaty, since U.S. military cluster bombs were used by Israel during the July War. Cuba policy? Clinton was stuck in the old Cuban-voters-in-Florida framework that has allowed that benighted policy to fail through the decades. Disarmament? No doubt Clinton better remembers the political pitfalls of that position during the Cold War.

Now the conventional wisdom holds that Clinton will be Obama's Secretary of State, and folks worry that her center-left brand of hawkishness will dilute Obama's promises of foreign policy change. It's possible, and we won't know for sure until foreign policy starts getting made. But in terms of speculation, I'd suggest that Clinton, working for someone whose political courage has let him ignore outdated political considerations and support a progressive foreign policy, will be more willing to adopt new policies since those political considerations will not be operative for her. That is to say, we can expect Clinton to be a solid advocate for the Obama foreign policy. Even if you buy the idea that Clinton is positioning herself for 2016, she's learned that a Democrat can win the presidency running on a liberal foreign policy, and no doubt understands that her future prospects depend on the perceived success of the Obama administration.

Of course, the key to all of this is mid- and sub-cabinet level staffing. Spencer shares America's concerns, but notes that the White House, even the hypothetical foreign policy team, is going to be pretty progressive. That's good news.

--Tim Fernholz

Some interesting stuff in a Gannett interview with Harry Reid. The Senate majority leader says immigration reform should be relatively easy to pass, and that's he's more concerned about health care.

Q: With more Democrats in the Senate and the House and a Democrat in the White House, how do you see congressional efforts playing out on such issues as health care and immigration?

A: On immigration, there's been an agreement between (President-elect Barack) Obama and (Arizona Republican Sen. John) McCain to move forward on that. ... We'll do that. We have to get this economy stuff figured out first, so I think we'll have a shot at doing something on health care in the next Congress for sure.

Q: Will there be as much of a fight on immigration as last time?

A: We've got McCain and we've got a few others. I don't expect much of a fight at all. Now health care is going to be difficult. That's a very complicated issue. We debated at great length immigration. People understand the issues very well. We have not debated health care, so that's going to take a lot more time to do

It's worth remembering, of course, that President Bush also supported immigration reform, but didn't have the political capital to get conservative Republicans in line on the issue. Reid seems to be betting that under Obama, conservatives will hold their fire on immigration in favor of fighting to the death on health care.

--Dana Goldstein

Harold Meyerson makes the case for keeping the big three out of bankruptcy:

In other words, the UAW did more to build the era of postwar American prosperity, when workers' paychecks kept up with productivity gains, than any single institution save the federal government itself. That's one reason why it's such a target for conservative attacks as the Big Three beg the government to bail them out: In an era when no productivity gains are shared with workers, when workers’ incomes have been stagnating for decades, the UAW still preserves some of the gains that were broadly shared among American workers three and four decades ago. Once the trendsetter for the unprecedentedly prosperous working class of the postwar decades (in 1947, Reuther called the union "the architects of America's future"), today's UAW is a lagging indicator of the slow (and now, not so slow) decline of America's workers. The union won so many gains in decades past that it has not yet given them all back. What could be more outrageous?

And Courntey Martin writes that Michelle Obama is poised to make veterans' issues a top concern:

The experiences of vets like my cousin Lang are about to gain more prominence. In recent interviews with major media outlets -- from 60 Minutes to Glamour Magazine -- Michelle Obama has been hinting that she may use her access and power come January to improve the state of affairs for military families and veterans. When Steve Kroft of CBS asked how she would "imprint" the job of first lady, Michelle Obama responded, "Well, the thing we've learned, you know, as we've watched this campaign, is that people, women, are capable of doing more than one thing well at the same time. And I've, you know, had to juggle being mom-in-chief and having a career for a long time. The primary focus for the first year will be making sure that the kids make it through the transition. But there are many issues that I care deeply about. I care about military families."

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

The recession is going to affect everyone differently. A lot of folks are going to have to tighten their belts, but thanks to various structural advantages, whether in age, human capital or personal/family wealth, they're basically going to be fine and able to look forward to a future Obama recovery. But that fact shouldn't blind us to the knowledge that a sizable number of the people are going to be in a lot of trouble. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities rolled out a report today highlighting the potential for deep poverty for millions of Americans and pushing for the forthcoming stimulus package to appropriate funds to lessen the impact of the recession on these families and the economy as a whole.

First, the bad news:

Goldman Sachs [ironic!] projects that the unemployment rate will rise to 9 percent by the fourth quarter of 2009 (the firm has increased its forecast for the unemployment rate a couple of times in the last month). If this holds true and the increase in poverty relative to the increase in unemployment is within the range of the last three recessions, the number of poor Americans will rise by 7.5-10.3 million, the number of poor children will rise by 2.6-3.3 million, and the number of children in deep poverty will climb by 1.5-2.0 million.

Already there are signs that the recession is hitting low-income Americans hard. Between September 2006 and October 2008, the unemployment rate for workers age 25 and over who lack a high school diploma — a heavily low-income group — increased from 6.3 percent to 10.3 percent.

... Today, only about 40 percent of families eligible for cash assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program actually receive it. That is about half the percentage of families eligible for TANF’s predecessor (the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program) that received its benefits during the recessions of earlier decades.

The prescriptions are more familiar: increase funding for the TANF contingency fund, give federal aid to states, and increase unemployment insurance, food stamps, and housing vouchers. I imagine there are people who will read this and be skeptical about increasing aid to the poor, but those aren't people who can't get a job in this economy. It's tough to say the government shouldn't have a role here when a big cause of the current recession was pernicious economic policy that allowed some very wealthy people to wreak public havoc but remain insulated from any kind of private risk, while people with, say, only high school educations who weren't doing spectacularly anyways are now deeply screwed.

--Tim Fernholz

It's official, barring a recount, Tom Perriello has unseated Virgil Goode in Virginia's 5th congressional district:

The State Board of Elections has certified challenger Tom Perriello as the winner over Republican Congressman Virgil Goode.

The board on Monday certified Perriello as the winner by 745 votes in the 5th District congressional race. Goode is entitled to a recount if he chooses.

Perriello's apparent victory gives Democrats a 6-5 majority in Virginia's congressional delegation.

It looks like Goode does intend to ask for a recount. It's his prerogative, and Goode has never even come close to losing before so I'd be surprised if he went out quietly. This is a remarkable reversal in terms of ideology as well: While Goode is a protectionist, he's very conservative on most issues, and while Perriello is pro-gun he's very liberal on most issues. This contest, which I wrote about earlier this month for TAP, was a choice between two candidates with extremely different political outlooks rather than a choice between a conservative southern Democrat and a conservative southern Republican.

-- A. Serwer

At Slate, Tom Zoellner pulls back the curtain on Janet Napolitano's relationship with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the rabidly anti-immigrant chief of police in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. Napolitano's history of looking the other way when it comes to Arpaio's excesses might mean that as DHS secretary, she couldn't be trusted to "stand up and speak out against excesses in law enforcement," Zoellner writes.

[Arpaio] is "America's toughest sheriff," a man who rose to prominence in the 1990s with such newsmaking stunts as feeding his inmates green bologna, clothing them in pink underwear, housing them in surplus Army tents behind barbed wire in the desert, and putting them to work on chain gangs. This punishment is inflicted equally on convicted criminals and those who have been convicted of no crime at all but are awaiting trial and unable to afford bail. Inmates who assault guards are put on rations of water and fortified bread. ...

More than a decade ago, Napolitano was in a position to help curb Arpaio's excesses. As a U.S. attorney in 1995, she was put in charge of a Justice Department investigation into atrocious conditions in Arpaio's "tent city." Napolitano carried out her task with what can best be described as reluctance, going out of her way to protect Arpaio from flak almost before the probe had started. "We're doing this with the complete cooperation of the sheriff," she told the Associated Press. "We run a strict jail but a safe jail, and I haven't heard from anyone who thinks that this is a bad thing."

Napolitano is a moderate on immigration. She sent the National Guard to the Arizona-Mexico border, but she also vocally opposed ballot initiatives in Arizona that would have made it illegal for immigrants to access public services. She is far to the left of most of her constituents on these issues, so she has actually shown some political courage. What's more, when it comes to Arpaio, Napolitano's spine seemed to stiffer in her second term; as Zoellner acknowledges, she rescinded the state funding Arpaio was using to conduct immigration raids that broke up families in the Phoenix area.

There's also the fact that as a female politician -- and one who came onto the national stage as a lawyer representing Anita Hill -- Napolitano has always gone to great pains to burnish her "tough" credentials. As I wrote in my July profile of Napolitano, "Her career since the [Clarence] Thomas hearings has been almost perfectly calibrated to play against feminine stereotypes. As U.S. attorney and, later, state attorney general, Napolitano built up law-and-order credibility and learned to appeal to Arizonans' libertarian sensibility, sometimes disappointing her progressive allies."

That's no excuse for the bad decision of overlooking Arpaio's excesses as U.S. Attorney. Similarly, Hillary Clinton doesn't get a pass on supporting the Iraq war just because she is female and her advisers believed no antiwar woman could credibly run for the presidency. But I think it's only fair to consider these women's political history alongside the stereotypes they had to overcome to get where they are today.

--Dana Goldstein

Later on today, at noon eastern time, Barack Obama will "announce" his economic team -- Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, Christina Romer as Council of Economic Advisers chair, Lawrence Summers as National Economics Council chair, and Peter Orzag as director of the Office of Management and Budget. High powered! And Rubin-centric, which should be mildly worrisome to progressives except that all have bought into the great left consensus on deficit spending. Another question, which will be taken up later after some reporting, is what happens to Austan Goolsbee and Jason Furman, the campaign's economic advisers?

Regarding the White House communications shop, two weekend appointments that didn't surprise -- Robert Gibbs as press secretary and Dan Pfeiffer as deputy communications director -- and one that did: Ellen Moran, currently the executive director of Emily's List, as communications director. I'm surprised that Obama chose someone he has not worked with before for this position, but by all accounts Moran is a talented operative. Mike Crowley notes this may come as a result of a Chicago connection with David Axelrod.

Finally, rumors that Jim Steinberg, previously thought of as a lock for the National Security Adviser post that seems headed Gen. James Jones way, is under consideration for Deputy Secretary of State, presumably working for putative Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Spencer Ackerman breaks down what this means; to my view, this should be reassuring to anyone worried that Clinton will stock the State Department with loyalists; though Steinberg worked in the Clinton administration, he has been an Obama adviser for some time and was one of the first Democratic foreign policy establishment types to call for withdrawal from Iraq in 2004.

--Tim Fernholz

Edward Hugh has been doing fantastic work (available at Fistful of Euros) describing the challenges presented by the financial crisis to various European economies. He suggests that Latvia (along with several others) will be forced to devalue its currency in response to the crisis. Unfortunately, it appears that voicing such an opinion in Latvia incurs a visit from the State Security Service:

According to the Baltic Course online newspaper Ventspils University College lecturer Dmitrijs Smirnovs was detained for two days recently on suspicion of spreading rumors about the devaluation of the Latvian currency. He was detained in connection with an opinion that he had expressed during a debate about the development of the Latvian economy and the future of the Latvian banking and credit system. His arrest followed the publication of his opinion in Ventspils’ local newspaper Ventas Balss.

Dmitrijs Smirnovs appears to have been detained by members of the Latvian Security Police, who seem to have been charged with the special mission of protecting the integrity of the Lat at this very delicate point in Latvian history.

--Robert Farley

In an article from our new print issue, Dana Goldstein profiles Janet Sadik-Khan, a dark-horse candidate for secretary of transportation and New York's very environmentally minded commissioner of transportation:

On the national level, Mike Bloomberg is now recognized as a progressive reformer, and his history as a Democrat turned Republican turned Independent, all for political gain, is largely overlooked. But New Yorkers, whose memories are longer, could hardly have predicted that the most recent iteration of their mayor's chameleon career would be the promotion of a bikeable, walkable city. What even most local observers don't realize is that the Bloomberg administration's unexpected commitment to these issues is due less to ideological conviction than to the influence of one woman: Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of New York City's Department of Transportation.

And Paul Starr considers whether we're a center-right nation:

The conservative interpretation ignores long-term trends in demography and public opinion that favor the Democrats. Since the early 1990s, younger voters have been moving in a more liberal direction, and Democrats have solidified their support among Latinos -- the most rapidly growing group in the population. Surveys have shown a steady rise in tolerance on race and sexual orientation as well as large majorities in favor of universal health coverage and other measures requiring an active governmental role. George W. Bush's two victories -- the first only in the Electoral College, the second after September 11 -- may have just temporarily held in check a wave of increasing liberal and Democratic strength.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

Michael Isikoff at Newsweek reports that the Obama people are considering a 9/11 style torture commission, in lieu of any actual prosecutions:

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible. "At a minimum, the American people have to be able to see and judge what happened," said one senior adviser, who asked not to be identified talking about policy matters. The commission would be empowered to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to open their files for review and question senior officials who approved "waterboarding" and other controversial practices. 

Obama aides are wary of taking any steps that would smack of political retribution. That's one reason they are reluctant to see high-profile investigations by the Democratic-controlled Congress or to greenlight a broad Justice inquiry (absent specific new evidence of wrongdoing). "If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you'd instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship," said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration. A new commission, on the other hand, could emulate the bipartisan tone set by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton in investigating the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 panel was created by Congress. An alternative model, floated by human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, would be a presidential commission similar to the one appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 and headed by Nelson Rockefeller that investigated cold-war abuses by the CIA.

It's sort of mindboggling to me that we eschew prosecutions of powerful people for committing crimes because doing so would inflame the pearl-clutching sensibility of the people who enabled those crimes. Others have made this argument before, but what we basically have is a system of justice that is based less on laws than on an evaluation of how the social and political power of a given target might influence the perception of the prosecution. Via Yglesias, Kevin Drum suggests that immunity from prosecution might allow us to know more of what actually happened:

So in the end, perhaps we'll get half of a Truth and Reconciliation commission: we'll get the truth, but not the reconciliation, since I doubt that any of the perpetrators of this stuff are inclined to show the slightest remorse for what they did. I suppose that here in the real world this might be the most we can expect, but I don't have to like it. And I don't.

I should add that it seems unlikely that Obama would set up a commission to investigate behavior that he intends to continue. That said, the Church Commission established the need for government authorities to secure a court order for surveillance purposes in 1978. Thirty years later, that's gone. The frightening thing about this debate over torture is that, given that it's been established as policy and has some popular support, not to mention support from government insiders, it's possible we may be having this debate indefinitely, even if everything comes to light.

-- A. Serwer

In a surprise move today, the Wal-Mart board announced that CEO Lee Scott was stepping down and that Vice-Chairman Mike Duke, who runs Wal-Mart’s international division, would take his place. In 2005, I wrote an article for the Prospect that told the tale of Jim Bill Lynn, a true-blue Wal-Mart executive who, upon discovering appalling conditions for workers in Wal-Mart’s Central American factories, reported his findings to his superiors – all the way up the chain to Mike Duke. Lynn was then subjected to harassment and surveillance from the company, until he was compelled to resign. For the role that Wal-Mart’s new CEO played in this disgraceful tale, read Jim Bill Lynn’s sad story.

--Harold Meyerson

• It's (almost) official: Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State in the Obama administration. For homework, read Spencer Ackerman on the loyalists Clinton will likely bring to State and how that could affect Obama's foreign policy.
• Timothy Geithner is expected to head the Obama Treasury, as Robert Kuttner suggested in September. Other likely appointments include Bill Richardson for Commerce Secretary, Patrick Gaspard for Political Director, and Ret. Gen. James L. Jones for National Security Adviser.
• Al Franken is claiming that the ongoing Minnesota recount now has him behind incumbent Norm Coleman by double digits, with about half of the ballots counted. And for true political junkies, you can watch a live feed of the recount here.
  
• Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed last night while concluding a speech at the Federalist Society but was released from George Washington University Hospital this morning. A battery of tests indicated "he had not suffered a stroke or other heart-related incident."
• Barack Obama's 21-month campaign for raised half a billion dollars online, according to The Washington Post. The president-elect has also extended his influence to pitching for Jim Martin in a Georgia radio spot and recording a video promoting Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
• Marin Cogan has an excellent piece in The New Republic on conservatism's new phantom menace: reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. On the same subject, this post by Nate Silver comes about as close to the Platonic ideal as I've ever seen towards explaining the relationship between talk radio to the conservative movement: "There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion. ... Stimulation [what conservative talk radio does -MD], however, is somewhat the opposite of persuasion. You're not going to persuade someone of something when you're (literally, in Ziegler's case) yelling in their ear. The McCain campaign was all about stimulation. The Britney Spears ads weren't persuasive, but they sure were stimulating! "Drill, baby, drill" wasn't persuasive, but it sure was stimulating! Sarah Palin wasn't persuasive, but she sure was (literally, in Rich Lowry's case) stimulating!" (emphasis in original)
• A popular new meme concerning the revival of conservatism seems to be the "technology will save us all" approach toward what Jonathan Stein calls "The GOP's Internet Insurgents." This is all interesting stuff, but at the end of the day the ability to communicate more effectively and more widely isn't the same thing as making the GOP brand more appealing, which is the real problem.
• The only thing I don't understand about this AP story reporting that Fred "future of the GOP" Thompson is returning to acting and abandoning his (quest?) for the RNC chairmanship is why the AP chose to claim Thompson is returning to acting; hasn't he already been playing the part of a laughably unambitious politician for the better part of a year now?
• And finally, Michelle Bachmann is now claiming that her McCarthyite rant last month is actually just an "urban legend." Uh-huh. Shorter Bachmann: I respect the intelligence of my audience so little that I assume they don't recognize the existence of the video recording technology which captured my unhinged rant in the first place.

--Mori Dinauer

This morning, I was wondering if there was a way for Obama to provide any kind of effective policy leadership on the economy before he is inaugurated in January, since the current status quo has left any progress in this area at loose ends. Well, perhaps I have my answer:

Then in what has become a common occurrence, the final hour of trading turned volatile again. Stocks surged this afternoon after CNBC and Wall Street Journal reported that New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy J. Geithner will be nominated to be Treasury secretary in the new administration.

The Dow closed up 6.5 percent, or 494 points, at 8046. The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 6.3 percent or 48 points, to 800, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq spiked 5.2 percent, or 68 points, to 1384.

Well, that's something. Now about that stimulus package, President Bush ...

--Tim Fernholz

More than 10,000 supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr protested peacefully against the Status of Forces Agreement in Baghdad today. This reminded me that the word "anti-American" is consistently used to refer to Sadr and the sentiments of his supporters.

But what does it mean to be "anti-American"? And why is this adjective used only on stances towards the United States? American citizenry are never divided among "pro-Iraqi" and "anti-Iraqi" camps, at least by the media. "Anti-American" blurs nuance, connoting a primal animosity, rooted in an abject resentment towards the essential condition of being American, of possessing American values and culture. It suggests that Sadr's followers are irrational and unable to distinguish between American foreign policy and the general American populace. Those who are "anti-American" are not discerning thinkers defined by their allegiance to sovereignty, but a crowd with a consuming opposition to the very idea of the U.S, regardless of what good or bad it does. Anti-Americans don't think and have grievances; they hate.

"Hard news" reporters would be better served by describing Sadrists as critical of the US occupation under any conditions; such a description would re-legitimize their interests and drop the unjustifiable clash-of-civilizations aura that surrounds every discussion of their sentiments.

--Zeeshan Aleem

Today, House Leader Nancy Pelosi held a press conference explaining what the Big Three automakers have to do in order to access a federal loan, asking for a written plan regarding three issues:

[O]n the accountability side, no dividends, and no bonuses for people making over $200,000. ... In addition to that, on the viability side, it talks about as they go forward, how they plan to make investments in the advanced technologies so that they can compete in the marketplace, so that the people will want to buy their cars.

We are all in this together. ... I reject those who say, let them go bankrupt and then we will deal after that. I just think that would be digging a hole far too deep, and just would have a devastating impact on the workers, on the economy, on the manufacturing base and on the confidence of the country.

It seems that congress has learned at least one lesson from the bailout, which is that any business socialism that goes on needs to come under strict provisions and with a very clear idea of who exactly is helping who. As to the idea of the loan itself, it is a good idea to work through a restructuring with federal aid because simply letting the firms slip towards what would likely be Chapter 7 bankruptcy would have disastrous economic results in a variety of sectors. But allowing the automakers to continue as they stand is unacceptable. Jon Cohn's arguments resonate.

From the Post, this note: "If Detroit bites on this, this will represent a significant and at one time unthinkable step forward in federal government control of how a private business runs itself. Think about it: This is Congress telling GM how to set corporate policy, at least for the term of a loan, which could be up to 10 years." To which I say, if the three automakers would like to run their businesses without the help of a government loan and the conditions attached to it, they can continue on in as they have been. Of course, continuing running their companies into the ground could prompt cries for nationalization, given the very negative national outcomes associated with the potential collapse of the companies.

Also, just for fun, Pelosi on corporate panhandling optics: "CEOs getting off a corporate jet rattling a tin cup is not a good image."

--Tim Fernholz

Pastor Amos Brown of the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco is also president of the local branch of the NAACP. Tonight he's holding an NAACP fundraiser, only many other ministers won't be attending. They are angry at Pastor Amos over his opposition to Prop 8:

Rochelle Metcalfe, a former writer for a local African American newspaper who now writes a community column on the Internet, said some black ministers are upset with Brown.

"I've been hearing about people who are upset that he supported the No on 8 campaign," she said. "He knows some people don't agree with him so I don't think the boycott is a surprise.

"But it is a hurtful issue because it is splitting our community."

Brown is convinced that some NAACP members are not attending the dinner because of his politics. He recently had a Sunday sermon interrupted by another minister who was upset that he was using the pulpit to show his support for gay marriage.

I happened to be interviewing Brown for an unrelated story, so I asked him for his thoughts on the subject. Brown does not perform gay marriages in his church, but he nonetheless opposes any measures making it illegal to do so, adding that "we don't live in a theocracy". Brown tied his opposition to Prop 8 to his experience growing up black in the forties and fifties, recalling the moment when he first saw Emmitt Till's mutilated body on the cover of Jet Magazine when he was only a teenager. "When I saw that picture," Amos says, "I promised G-d myself, never would I be mean to people who were different."

He also notes a connection between the some of the religious groups opposing gay rights and those who remained on the wrong side of the black liberation movement in the United States. "The Southern Baptist convention was organized because southern folks wanted to keep their slaves." Amos said. "They failed us on integration...Jerry Falwell opened the Christian academy that became liberty college in later years, because he and his members didn't want their children going to integrated schools."

Amos placed most of the blame on the religious organizations who funded and organized the Yes on 8 campaign, comparing them to churches in the past that acquiesced to racist laws rather than challenging them. In the meantime, the President of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous, decided at the last minute to attend the fundraiser, possibly in a show of solidarity with Amos. Gov. David Paterson of New York, who pushed his state to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, will also attend.

Amos had more to say about religious groups pushing Prop 8: "They're so insecure full of fear and fright that they're doing the same thing to gays that they did to black people when they came out against interracial marriages. They said there would be a mongrelization of the race, that it would tear up America."

"This is what was said. I heard that when I was young. I saw that. So why should I turn around and become that which I hated?"

I don't know.

--A. Serwer

The New York Daily News reports that Obama campaign political director Patrick Gaspard will be the White House political director. There's already been some controversy over the White House Office of Political Affairs office and some demands that the directorate be eliminated; I argued that the office was a good idea. The president -- who is one political actor among many -- simply shouldn't be flying blind. And so, though we haven't heard an official yes or no on keeping the office itself, it seems that there will be someone whose job will be handling the vital work of what I like to call policy making by other means.

See also GOP operative Ed Rollins' defense of the office this morning.

--Tim Fernholz

Scrapping along the heels of my better-sourced colleagues, here's the fake-ish news of the day:

• Hillary Clinton accepts Secretary of State offer. Or so sez The New York Timers, which would not run with their very decisive lede if they didn't have it down cold. Right? This is a strong choice for Obama, presuming that he has made clear that it will be his foreign policy, not hers, and also that the White House will retain a significant role in choosing deputies. Ensuring the right candidates fill the middle-levels of the State Department is a key step towards fully implementing Obama's foreign policy vision, as Spencer Ackerman explains here.
• Tim Geithner will be Secretary of the Treasury. This from MSNBC's Chuck Todd, who thinks that Obama will announce his economic team on Monday. The choice is not all that surprising; Geithner has acquitted himself reasonably well throughout the financial crisis as President of the New York Fed, and functions effectively as Larry Summers without the baggage. Learn more about this potential public servant in Bob Kuttner's aptly titled September story, "Meet the next Treasury Secretary." The usual suspects -- Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee and Dan Tarullo -- are in the mix for Council of Economic Advisors, National Economic Council or a domestic policy position. Sort those three at will.

• Bill Richardson is in the running for Secretary of Commerce. This one, also from MSNBC, is the furthest out there. Richardson, who has a resume fit for many tasks, doesn't really seem like the right person for Commerce. There is presumably a rationale for this pick, traditionally given to business-types, perhaps surrounding the importance of the global economy or the development of green infrastructure.

--Tim Fernholz

Ben Adler has a provocative piece at Campus Progress arguing that mid-distance light rail -- such as the L.A. to San Francisco project that passed on the California ballot -- is over hyped.

While making the trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco by high-speed rail instead of by flying would save some CO2 emissions, the bigger problem is not that you can’t get from L.A. to San Francisco fast enough by train, it’s that you can’t get around L.A. or San Diego, the nation’s second and eighth largest cities, respectively, without a car. ...

I don’t want to set up a false dichotomy between inter-city travel like the high-speed rail initiative and intra-city and commuter transit like city buses; each is beneficial in their own way. But, assuming there is a competition among scarce resources, there must be a healthy debate about not just the need for rail redevelopment in general, but what should be a top priority.

Indeed, with the economic crisis hitting state budgets especially hard, it isn't unreasonable to ask these questions. Ideally, we'd be able to move forward on plans like the California initiative while simultaneously making sure light rail lines link up usefully to regional and intra-city transit systems. After all, if there's no way from your train stop to your job, family member's home, or to tourist attractions, you can't fundamentally alter the way you get around. But in a situation of scare resources, it might be smarter to focus first on getting people onto mass transit for their commutes. The California light rail line will impact some longer commutes, but in general, won't allow most workers to leave their cars at home.

--Dana Goldstein

Yesterday, the illustrious American Prospect published short essays by various youth politics activists and thinkers, responding to the question, "How do we keep Obama's youth voters mobilized?" While it's a great thing that young voters are being taken seriously as a political constituency, the question is a bit condescending in its formulation.

The better question to ask is, "How will youth voters continue organzing themselves?" or even "How can progressives engage with youth voters?" Millennial generation-focused youth politics groups are already beginning to organize a summit early in the coming year to discuss the future of their movement during an Obama administration and what the goals of youth political participation should look like. One of the great things about Obama's youth outreach program is that it didn't dumb itself down or expect young people not to have ideas of their own, and that should be kept in mind all future work with on these issues -- not that anyone in the piece necessarily forgets that.

Cautions aside, the query generated some interesting responses from the participants (which included several youth leaders), including this one from Peter Levine of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement:

During the campaign, Obama gave youth many ways to plug in, from "friending" him on Facebook to taking a semester off to organize. Now that the election is over, he needs to offer a similar range of opportunities to cement their engagement. An issue like climate change requires a full spectrum of participation, from pledging not to drive once a week, to advocating legislation, to weatherizing homes as an Americorps volunteer, to becoming an EPA scientist. At a time when jobs are scarce and the public sector is weak and archaic, citizens' work should be the hallmark. Then, there will be Obama Democrats in 2060 the way there are New Deal Democrats today.

This is exactly right. Youth voting participation, both in terms of share of the electorate and percentage of young people who voted, both rose several points from previous elections, but the important phenomenon was the percentage of young voters who supported Obama, which was through the roof compared to any previous election in the last twenty years. I pointed out in this op-ed that first-time participants in the political system often set ideological preferences for the long term; Ronald Reagan, by winning majorities of the youth vote, helped build the conservative coalition. Many of these new progressive voters will continue supporting progressive candidates and policies, and giving them the opportunity to further commit to these ideals -- and to public service -- is very good idea.

--Tim Fernholz

Terrence Samuel considers the meaning of Joe Lieberman:

Still the narrative that emerged this week was that Lieberman's shape-shifting abilities had saved him yet again. He was the survivor. But while he will chair a powerful and important committee, Lieberman has no margin for error. While Harry Reid and Democrats -- salivating over the potential of having 60 filibuster-busting votes -- made their deal with the devil to preserve the possibility, Lieberman has tied his fate to the whims of a Democratic caucus that will regard him with an unstable mix of caution and suspicion. His days as a free agent are over.

And Harold Meyerson explains the context of Henry Waxman's defeat of John Dingell and explains why Californians have come to dominate the House Democratic caucus.

With his victory, Waxman now joins a small group of longtime California allies who are running key congressional institutions. Howard Berman, his political sidekick since they took over the California Young Democrats in 1965, chairs the House Foreign Relations Committee. Like George Miller, who chairs the House Education and Labor Committee and who is Nancy Pelosi's consigliere, and like Pelosi herself, Berman and Waxman are the political protégés of the late Phil Burton -- the militantly liberal San Francisco congressman of the 1960s and 1970s who was probably the single most effective liberal legislator the House has ever known. One of Burton's achievements was to persuade the House Democratic caucus to change its rules on committee chairmanships, so that seniority wasn't the sole criterion in determining a committee's chair. With the backing of the Democratic Watergate classes -- the new members elected in 1974 and 1976 -- Burton changed the process so that the caucus itself was sovereign, and could depose old Southern segregationists from their chairmanships. Thirty years later, Waxman has taken advantage of the Burton reforms so that the generation of California liberals whom Burton schooled in the ways of power are now the most powerful members of the House.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

Glenn Greenwald unloads on Obama for potentially considering John Brennan for Director of the CIA or National Intelligence:

To appoint someone as CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence who was one of George Tenet's closest aides when The Dark Side of the last eight years was conceived and implemented, and who, to this day, continues to defend and support policies such as "enhanced interrogation techniques" and rendition (to say nothing of telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping), is to cross multiple lines that no Obama supporter should sanction. Truly turning a page on the grotesque abuses of the last eight years requires both symbolism (closing Guantanamo) and substantive policy changes (compelling adherence to the Army Field Manual, ensuring due process rights for all detainees, ending rendition, restoring safeguards on surveillance powers). Appointing John Brennan to a position of high authority would be to affirm and embrace, not repudiate, the darkest aspects of the last eight years.

At the same time, it still comes down to how Obama draws the line. I don't have a personal vendetta against Brennan, my issue is with torture itself. If Obama said explicitly that he would force the CIA to stick to the rules outlined in the Army Field Manual, if there were a very specific agenda put forth outlining exactly how this practice would be ended forever, either through legislation or executive order, I wouldn't be completely unsettled by a Brennan appointment. But we haven't seen that, we've seen a lot of broad moral declarations about torture, not so different from those the White House's current occupant has made in the past, and at the very least a mixed message through the language of his reported appointments. But while a Brennan appointment says one thing, the Holder and Jones appointments would send the opposite message. It's far from clear that Obama has capitulated on this issue.

--A. Serwer

Judge Richard Leon -- an appointee of George W. Bush -- issued a major ruling following the wake of the Supreme Court's Boumediene decision yesterday, ordering five Guantanamo detainees released "forthwith." He also added comments that echoed Souter's Boumediene concurrence:

The judge, in an unusual added comment, suggested to senior government leaders that they forgo an appeal of his ruling on freeing the five prisoners. While conceding that the government had a right to appeal that part of his ruling, Leon commented that he, too, had “a right to appeal” to leaders of the Justice Department, Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies, and his plea was that they look at the evidence regarding the five he was ordering released. “Seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to their legal question is enough,” he commented.

This brings the grand total of arbitrarily held detainees released by the federal courts to ... five. If I understand correctly, to many Republicans this means that out-of-control judicial activists are essentially running American foreign policy. In fairness, since when has scrutinizing wholly arbitrary executive detentions been considered a function of the judiciary?

--Scott Lemieux

Jeffrey Goldberg is trying to come up with a list of the top-50 philo-Semites. There's something uncomplimentary about the term; it suggests, as Goldberg writes, "anti-Semites who like Jews." In other words, Christian Zionists such as John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, who love Jews so much that they want us all to leave America, go "back" to Israel, and be smote by Jesus.

But there's another class of philo-Semite, a group who actually do seem inspired by Jewish teachings and culture. Goldberg counts Barack Obama as a philo-Semite, and I'd agree. In a 2004 interview with Chicago Sun-Times religion writer Cathleen Falsani, Obama said, "[I]ntellectually I've drawn as much from Judaism as any other faith." Other people I'd add to the list? Princeton professor Cornel West, who's involved with the American Jewish peacenik movement Tikkun, and Newark mayor Cory Booker, who, as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, became president of the Jewish L'Chaim Society. The group's founder, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, has called Booker “the most effective non-Jewish exponent of Judaism in the entire world.”

Of course, it's no coincidence that all three of these individuals are African American.

I'd also count Christopher Hitchens as a philo-Semite. At the age of 38, Hitchens discovered his maternal grandmother was Jewish. That means according to the Jews, he's one of us. (And many of us see no contradiction between atheism and 21st century Judaism.) Hitchens came to identify as ethnically Jewish.

--Dana Goldstein

Who are the Somali pirates? Why is piracy surging now? Why don't merchant ships just arm themselves? If a question can't be answered in an animated short, then it's just not a good question...

--Robert Farley

The economy continues to worsen, and the experts are not pleased that the current lame duck government has left economic policy blowing in the wind until the new guys take over in January. Paul Krugman looks at why this is a bad thing, but doesn't get into what the president or president-elect should be doing to solve this problem. Floyd Norris, on the other hand, is more straightforward:

By resigning from the Senate before the current session began and allowing it to appear that a sense of drift could prevail until he is inaugurated, Mr. Obama may have missed an opportunity to exert leadership.

Maybe. While the consequences of the government's failure to act now are clear, it is less clear what Obama could and should be doing to influence policy before his inauguration. Even if he had maintained his Senate seat, it seems doubtful that he could gin up support for an automaker rescue package in the face of a presidential veto and filibustering Republican minority. There is the question of decorum -- branch overlap between Obama's future executive position and his current legislative one, and overlap between his goals as president and Bush's. I'm all in favor of setting aside decorum in favor of achievement, but I'm not sure I see a path for Obama to really exert any power until he's ensconced in the Oval office with larger Democratic congressional majorities.

Folks have been discussing moving inauguration closer to the election in the future, I don't see any reason why this is bad idea so long as adequate time is left for transition; we've already changed the date once in our history and it's clear that contemporary communications technology, among other advances, has created a situation where the new president could be in office around mid-December while the incumbent has a month remaining on the docket. An agreement could presumably be made that Bush would support, or refuse to veto, certain items that the new president will be supporting in January, but it's hard to imagine the present incumbent agreeing to such a power sharing agreement.

--Tim Fernholz

• Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano is likely to become Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, which would leave the governor's mansion in Republican hands and probably remove any serious competition to John McCain in 2010. Although, as Think Progress observes, DHS has become a dumping ground for political cronies of Michael Chertoff and George Bush, burrowed into the agency under the guise of preparing for a smooth transition. Gov. Napolitano is certain to have her work cut out for her.
• In other transition news, Penny Pritzker has turned down an offer to be Commerce Secretary, and John Kerry, still a remote possibility for SoS, will take the gavel at the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee which he first appeared before as a serious young Vietnam veteran in 1971.
• Henry Waxman has prevailed over John Dingell to win the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Harold Meyerson: "Now, after a 14-year winter, it's legislating season again. Greenhouse gases are rising, the farms and factories producing the things we ingest have been spread across the globe, the number of uninsured has risen. Obama needs an ally on the Hill who can craft bills and obtain votes for the change he's pledged to deliver. He needs a master legislator. He needs Henry Waxman."
• Steve Clemons floats the idea that Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State could set up a good-cop, bad-cop routine: "If Obama wants to change the strategic game on Iran, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Cuba, Russia and other challenges, he will need partners who are perceived as tough, smart, shrewd and even skeptical of the deals he wants to do. Clinton is all of these. ... Because she is trusted by Pentagon-hugging national security conservatives, she may legitimize his desire to respond to this pivot point in American history with bold strokes rather than incremental ones. ... He intends to, in part, be his own secretary of state, focused on re-sculpting America's global social contract and working in partnership with a diverse team of hard-edged policy players like Clinton to make even his rivals do his direct bidding."
• Even as Norm Coleman's lead over Al Franken has been reduced in the Minnesota recount, some ballots are leaving state officials in a Rashomon-like state of confusion. Try this quiz, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio, to see how you would call these ballots.
• Recalling Matt Yglesias' short essay at Cato Unbound on practical politics compromising libertarian purity, Brian Doherty suggests that even though the idea of Barack Obama appointing Ron Paul as Treasury Secretary will never happen, it remains "a good idea." Perhaps it never occurred to Doherty that the very reason why such an idea is so implausible is because, you know, it's just a really bad idea.
• One hopes that the rest of George Bush's life resembles this video from the G20 summit where world leaders simply ignore the 43rd president while he walks about, in the words of Rick Sanchez, "like the dejected most unpopular kid in high school."
• Chris Bowers has a good post on the shaky future of the Democrats' 50-state strategy now that the election's over and DNC workers are being laid off.

--Mori Dinauer

Yesterday, Colombian vice president Francisco Santos Calderon reported that cokeheads were destroying the environment. Speaking before the Association of Chief Police Officers in the UK, he released the sober statistic that four square meters of rainforest are destroyed for every gram of nose candy snorted. From The Guardian:

"He said that while the green agenda would not persuade addicts to give up, the middle-class social user who drove a hybrid car and was concerned about the environment might not take the drug if they knew its impact."

Calderon then went on about the land cleared for coca plant cultivation being dominated by guerillas.

First, it's unfair to single out drug users as a primary driver of environmental degradation, especially when the consumption of something as seemingly innocuous as chocolate bars is responsible for far greater eradication of rainforests than cocaine ever will be. Palm oil used for chocolate, cooking and fueling products is bought in mass volumes by companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Nestle, Hershey, Kraft and Burger King. It's used as an ingredient in a substantial amount of cosmetics, as a cheap vegetable oil and increasingly as biofuel for vehicles -- but the amount of trees cut down for palm oil production releases far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than is saved by switching some cars from fossil- to bio-fueling. In fact, the greenhouse gases released from deforestation is far greater than that released by all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world.

Calderon hopefully is aware of massive forest clearing for palm oil because Colombia is the largest producer and exporter of palm oil in South America. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is hoping that Bush's wish for a Colombia Free Trade Agreement will be granted so they can further expand palm oil exports. Malaysia and Indonesia are by far the largest palm oil pushers in the world. But cross hemispheres and Colombia is on top. Speaking of Malaysia and Indonesia, their top customer is Cargill, who supplies Nestle who makes Kit Kats. Every second 418 Kit Kat fingers are consumed, but Calderon isn't singling out Kit Kat-abusers.

Rather, Calderon engages in environmental-profiling, by singling out yuppies on the road who apparently are guilty of "driving while green" while doing lines off the armrests of their Toyota Priuses. It's an unfair profile. The environmentally unconscious person who makeups their face and eats palm-oil-rich products is creating the much greater sin against rainforests.” What Calderon overlooks though are the sins his government has committed against its Afro-Columbian population. Speaking to the police chiefs, he made note of the human rights abuses that come with cocaine production, but the human rights of Afro-Colombians who've been moved off the lands they've occupied since the early 1500s, when Africans were first brought there for slavery by Spaniard merchants, are a greater violation. Under Calderon's/Uribe's administration, palm oil expansion has led to the seizure of land that is supposed to be constitutionally protected for Colombian descendants of slaves. But Afro-Colombians have for years complained of paramilitaries coming to their homes -- sometimes in police or government vehicles -- and forcing them out by way of gun. The United States actually fosters this displacement of black Colombians through the USAID program, which helps disarm and resettle former right-wing paramilitaries. Problem is, they're resettled on Afro-Columbian land. Millions of black Colombians have either been displaced or straight murdered. The Proceso de Comunidades, a network of over 140 black Colombian organizations, have been fighting to reclaim their land, but many of their leaders have been killed also. Most other Afro-Colombians languish in extreme poverty. Uribe's answer to this has been a program that gives jobs to Afro-Colombians maintaining and harvesting the same palm trees that led to their homelessness. Workers in this program have reported that the owners of the new palm oil plantations have been secretly engaging in illegal crop-growing, namely coca plant farming.

--Brentin Mock

Ed Kilgore says that "a critical plurality of Americans don't much like abortion but care a whole lot about when and why abortions occur." Assuming that this is true -- and there's some evidence for it -- the obvious answer is that since there's no way of inscribing "women should get abortions only when a Mythical Abortion Centrist says they're appropriate" into a legislative enactment, the best way of addressing this majority is to leave the decision to women rather than to, say, panels of doctors enforcing inherently arbitrary standards.

Ross Douthat, conversely, simply pretends that random regulations have the effect of reducing "abortions of convenience," while failing to adduce any evidence that the regulations actually have these effects. (Tellingly, he cites Glendon, but one of the crucial flaws in her book is that she focuses on the abortion laws in statute books but makes little attempt to find out how these laws actually operate in practice.) Of course, this is a somewhat difficult question for the same reason that it's an appalling suggestion on the merits: Who says what an "abortion of convenience" is? (One would think that it would be an even more meaningless and offensive term to a pro-lifer than it is to me, but I guess not.)

At any rate, there's no reason to believe that putting up arbitrary barriers in front of women seeking abortions has much effect on why women choose abortions; rather, they just make it more difficult for some classes of women (poor, rural, single mothers, inflexible working hours) to obtain them. Similarly, Douthat argues that "in a similar 'no abortions of convenience' vein, you could also imagine a law that banned repeat abortion." Omitted is any justification for assuming a priori that a second abortion is an abortion "of convenience."

Basically, attempts to tie various random regulations to mythical abortion "centrism" is a giant scam. Making women wait 24 hours to obtain an abortion isn't going to stop educated women who live in major cities from obtaining an abortion no matter what the reason, and they make it more difficult for a poor women who lives 150 miles from an abortion provider to obtain one even if William Saletan himself would bless her choice. Which is why -- even leaving aside the question of why we should care what Ross Douthat or William Saletan thinks about a woman's reasons for obtaining an abortion in the first place -- leaving the choice to the affected women with a minimum of pointless restrictions is the right policy choice.

--Scott Lemieux

In an article from our November issue, Tara McKelvey reports on how counterinsurgency theory has come to dominate military thinking -- and what implications that has for the Obama administration:

John Nagl's memories of Vietnam are vague, at best. He was, after all, only two years old during the 1968 Tet offensive and was in grade school in Omaha, Nebraska, during the fall of Saigon. It is perhaps for this reason that Nagl, a former tank commander turned military strategist, does not see Vietnam as a symbol of dishonor, the way older military officers do. Rather, the Vietnam War is a subject to be studied: Nagl's acclaimed book, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, explores lessons from the American experience in fighting an insurgency in Vietnam. He's been one of the foremost proponents of applying those same techniques in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tim Fernholz writes that Obama's transition has been downright ... boring:

When it comes to the transition, the most important cliché is this: If you know, you don't say, and if you say, you don't know. The work going on among the Agency Review teams and the personnel office remains hidden, leaving reporters to fixate on high-level appointments. And there haven't been many. Sure, Rahm Emanuel publicly agonized over his appointment for a few days, and there have been constant (and conflicting) reports about Hillary Clinton's potential role as secretary of state. But standards have dropped: In the past, good insider information told who was stabbing whom in the back to become Treasury secretary. Now the press just wants to know who got the job. Pretty please?

And nine youth organizers, writers, and progressive-policy thinkers weigh in about how to keep young voters engaged in politics now that the election is over:

Jeff Blodgett: Write Them into the Progressive Agenda
Ivan Frishberg: Convince Them to Love the Government
Sally Kohn: Stand Them on the Shoulders of Progressive Giants
Gara LaMarche: Ask Them to Support Likeminded Groups
Peter Levine: Keep Them Behind Obama
Courtney E. Martin: Fund Community-Organizing Programs for Them
Kristina Rizga: Connect the Campaign's E-mail List with Activism Databases
Kevin Simowitz: Let Them Unplug, Hit the Streets
Erica L. Williams: Give Them Civic Education

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

Brief evaluations of possible Attorney General nominee Eric Holder's record have shown him to be pro-civil liberties, anti-torture and anti-extraordinary rendition. Conservatives have brought up two fairly lame objections: The first faults Holder for the pardoning of Marc Rich, as though it was his decision, while the second is the claim that, because Holder previously worked in Washington under the Clintons he doesn't represent "change." Of course, if Obama was filling cabinet and White House positions with friendly, inexperienced incompetents the objection would be that he was engaging in cronyism and that isn't change either.

At any rate, Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones weighs in with a more substantive critique of Holder, namely that he failed to distinguish himself as U.S. Attorney by fighting municipal corruption in the District:

Previous US attorneys in the District, who were white and Republican, had spent an inordinate amount of time and resources trying to put Marion Barry behind bars. Those decisions earned them little outright hostility from city residents, so Holder's appointment and approach came as welcome change. Even so, members of the DC Council and other public servants working to clean up the city government complained that Holder had gone a little too far the other way. They thought he was depriving the city of some of the much-needed sunshine that can come with a public trial. Holder's reluctance to pull the trigger on many of the investigations generated by law enforcement in DC ensured that many of those responsible for the city's dysfunction continued to flourish. (As the former city auditor told me at the time, "No one ever makes the bad guys pay back the money. If you don't mind a little embarrassment in DC, you can steal to your heart's content.")

Some, like Jeralyn at TalkLeft, have expressed concerns over whether he can display the necessary independence to be an effective AG. These folks may interpret Holder's behavior in DC as evidence he won't rock the boat in the White House either, even if necessary. But I'm inclined to give Holder the benefit of the doubt, both because he took the right positions on the right issues back when doing so was practically considered treason, and because of his expressed views on the position of AG, both of which Glenn Greenwald highlighted earlier this week.

--A. Serwer

A fleet of European warships operating under the aegis of the European Union is headed for the Horn of Africa:

Britain is to lead an armada of EU warships to the Gulf of Aden next month to tackle the escalating problem of piracy, in a mission expected to last 12 months.

The naval fleet, under UK command, would "disrupt and tackle the scourge of piracy", foreign secretary David Miliband said yesterday on a visit to Beirut. Piracy threatened trade and prosperity, he added.

EU military planners this week drew up a mandate, including rules of engagement for the use of force, for the mission at a meeting at Northwood, Britain's joint operations centre in north-west London. Plans for the EU fleet, led by HMS Northumberland and known as Operation Atalanta, are due to be formally agreed early next month, European defence officials said yesterday.

One potential list here. I must admit that I have a strong sympathy for Sonia Sotomayor, given her role in stopping MLB's attempted bad faith union-busting in 1995, but she seems too moderate to be a good first choice on a Court with four doctrinaire reactionaries and no Brennan/Marshall/Douglas style liberal. Marshall's former clerk Elena Kagan -- who's only 48 -- seems a lot more promising.

Since many progressives are understandably less-than-enthused about the possibility of a Sunstein appointment, the best news I can give is that one logic of my critique of Sunstein's "minimalism" is that the effect it has on a justice's votes is very minimal. It's true that Sunstein has said some bad things about Roe; it's also true that he ends up in the same place (with, in this case, a rationale that's actually better and more expansive.) I suspect he'd cast the same kind of votes as most other potential Democratic nominees even if they would sometimes be justified with a little more hand-wringing.

--Scott Lemieux

As Dana noted yesterday, there's an e-mail circulating in religious right circles, slamming Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland who's running for chair of the Republican National Committee. Steele's offense: an insufficiently anti-Roe stance during a 2006 interview with the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press. His allies have come to his defense, noting that he's the only one running who has been endorsed by the hard-line National Right to Life Committee. (None of the other candidates, to my knowledge, have, like Steele, run for public office, thus opening themselves up for an NRLC endorsement or non-endorsement.)

Don Wildmon of the American Family Association (which this year is selling your very own burning cross as a Christmas decoration), has endorsed Katon Dawson, chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, and brought up the Russert interview as one reason he was lobbying against Steele. (He did not explain why he was passing over Chip Saltsman, who's also running for the RNC post, and who managed the presidential campaign of Wildmon-approved Mike Huckabee.)

Now Steele has defended himself against the charges, taking to the reporters and editors of the Washington Times to explain his position: he's against Roe, he's for amending the constitution to criminalize abortion, and he's in favor of the legality of abortion being decided by the states. (Doesn't that cover all the bases? You know, because if you want the states to decide the issue, a federal constitutional amendment is surely the way to go.) He's also throwing in a bit of Huckabee-style populism, saying the GOP has a "country club mentality" and has focused on superficial outreach rather than coalition-building.

It's the Wildmons of the Republican Party who were the target of the lately marvelous Kathleen Parker , who earlier this week warned that the party is headed for extinction if it soldiers on with the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP."

But Steele's not ready to let go of the religious right base, either, telling the Times that he didn't think that religious conservatives had too much control over the party. Steele exerted himself in appealing to the religious right base at this year's Values Voters Summit, with talk of a "relentless assault on [our] core values," wondering "when did being a Christian become a pejorative in this country?", claiming "how being on God’s team impacts communities, family, the nation," and gearing up the already Palin-manic crowd to "not underestimate this woman . . . . any woman who raises five kids. . . . she can do any daggone thing she wants. You don’t want to mess with this woman, she shoots moose. What do you think she’s going to do to a donkey?"

--Sarah Posner

The Los Angeles Times has a piece this morning on anti-war activists' fears that the Obama cabinet will be stocked with hawks.

True enough, many of his principal foreign policy advisers, including his Vice-President Joe Biden, voted for the war in 2003 but have become critics since then. The article points to the potential decision to keep the incumbent Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, in his job for a year as a sign that Obama is going to be more hawkish, but it's really the exact opposite: Gates will be used as cover to draw-down forces in Iraq; though he is a Republican, he is not a neoconservative and has been in touch with the reality of the Iraqi occupation. John Kerry is mentioned as a potential adviser who would be criticized for his vote for the war in 2003, but would anyone deny he has become a serious anti-war voice in his own right since then?

Even worse, the article assumes that cabinet officials are the most important, when in fact most foreign policy decisions will be made in the White House. Two important aides names aren't even mentioned: Leading National Security Adviser candidate Jim Steinberg began calling for a withdrawal timetable as early as 2004, and Susan Rice, Steinberg's likely Deputy and the campaign's top foreign affairs aide, has been an opponent of the war since the very beginning. These are two very important aides whose views will impact Obama's policy making from the get-go.

But part of the problem is that anti-war groups who worked hard to elect Obama may be expecting him to be anti-war in general as opposed to anti-the Iraq war. No doubt many of them do realize that. But despite this, Obama and his team will withdraw the troops from Iraq; there's no dissent surrounding the necessity of that decision. And I would worry less about Hillary Clinton, who never apologized for her war vote, as Secretary of State. Obama will not bring her on board unless he will be confident she will advocate his administration's views in public even if her private advice is more hawkish.

Even the article's attempt to increase paranoia about the 16-month deadline seems a little off. We've seen those attempts before, and they've been wrong. While there will obviously be some flexibility as planning continues, don't be surprised if 16 months remains the gold standard.

Incidentally, while it's totally appropriate for various constituencies on the left to hold Obama's feet to the fire, I think they should try and pick their battles. Obama has no incentive to stay in Iraq and will likely pull out as promised, but he has every incentive to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. While I still think that may be the right decision, if I were solidly anti-war that's where I would be focusing my efforts.

--Tim Fernholz

Homeland Security is a vast, sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses 22 separate agencies, including the Immigration and Naturalization Service, FEMA, and the Transportation Security Administration. Napolitano is serious, wonky, and known for running a tight, bipartisan ship in Phoenix, so she has the skills necessary to get DHS under control. But undoubtedly, it was Napolitano's success at charting a third way on immigration that got her noticed by national Democrats. As I wrote in my July profile of Napolitano, she called for the National Guard to be sent to the border before the Bush administration did, and she signed one of the most restrictive anti-immigration bills in the country, an employer sanctions law that enforces stiff penalties for hiring undocumented workers.

You'd think this would piss off immigrants' rights activists and liberals -- and indeed, they were skeptical at first. But Napolitano's reasoned compromises on immigration -- and her ability to talk about the issue in a way that recognizes concerns on both sides -- has allowed her to veto many of the harshest anti-immigrant measures served up by the nativists in Arizona's state legislature, all the while maintaining a 76 percent approval rating in one of the most anti-immigration states in the country. Napolitano can truly be credited with holding back a tidal wave of anti-immigrant sentiment in her state.

We need that kind of leadership on immigration at the national level. And hopefully, during his first year in office, Obama will take the counsel of experts like Napolitano and tackle comprehensive immigration reform.

--Dana Goldstein

Image used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user cobalt123.

And now we know: Representative Henry Waxman beats out Representative John Dingell, 137 to 122 in a vote among the Democratic House caucus, to chair the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Liberals FTW! I noted yesterday that Waxman's chances seem to be improving, and clearly that worked out today.

This is good news for liberals. Waxman runs a mean committee -- his previous work on the House Oversight Committee had been exemplary -- and it spells hope for the success of an aggressive energy bill and even improvements on telecommunications policy. And with former Waxman aide Phil Schiliro running Obama's legislative outreach shop in the White House, there looks to be plenty of synergy between the two branches this spring.

--Tim Fernholz

I'm breaking out my P-Mate, because Jonathan Chait and I are engaged in a little pissing match about identity politics. He argued that, in the early days of Bill Clinton's presidency, "the primary mistake was to allow social issues to dominate the agenda" -- namely, gays in the military and appointing a cabinet that "looked like America." I replied that Clinton's missteps on gays in the military and female appointees for attorney general were symptoms of overall problems and disarray in the White House. Yesterday, Chait responded, again blaming the Clinton administration's "mania for diversity":

I further contended in my column that the complaints from minority groups, and the perception that Clinton was scrambling to meet their demands, was the most damaging aspect of all. This, along with "don't ask, don't tell," helped change the primary subject from the economy, where Clinton enjoyed strong majority support, to social issues, where he did not.

Clinton promised repeatedly during the campaign to make repealing the ban on gays in the military a top priority -- it wasn't a demand made by gay-rights groups out of nowhere once he was elected. Sure, gay-rights supporters pressured him to act on his campaign pledge. But at the end of the day, Clinton was in control. He could have told them from the outset that he was waiting six months to tackle the issue, until after he had passed major economic initiatives. But he didn't. That was ultimately his choice -- not one made by "identity groups."

In my piece on Tuesday, I never said that Obama should go about achieving diversity in his cabinet the same way Clinton did. I am glad Clinton chose to make a diverse cabinet a priority. But he executed these goals poorly. It's not politically smart to declare, in effect, "We have set aside this position for a woman." It's smart to simply make it a priority to consider and vet many female candidates. Obama's deft ability during the campaign to speak to and about "identity groups" without pissing off people like Chait makes me at least somewhat hopeful that Obama's White House will be able to simultaneously make diversity a priority and not have it be a debacle. But Chait has a hard time squaring this belief of mine:

So, after devoting more than a thousand words to defending the identity politics left, she concedes in the end that Obama will probably ignore them, and therefore succeed? Then what on earth is her point?

My point, since Chait asked so sweetly, is that the view espoused by so many pundits these days -- that vocal women and people of color are going to screw it all up for Obama -- is false. I believe that much-maligned "identity groups" have every right to call on Obama to appoint people who look like them, and to ask him to keep his campaign promises. I did say Obama would probably not consider the complaints of women and people of color the top factor in his decision-making process. However, I didn't say that would guarantee Obama's success -- I simply said that their demands would not ensure his failure.

And finally, Chait is upset that I pointed out that this sit-down-and-shut-up view is primarily coming from -- and primarily benefits -- Democrats who are white and male.

She's trying to imply that I'm bigoted or that my views are illegitimate because I am not a member of an oppressed class. I prefer the old-fashioned notion that an idea can be judged on its merits, quite apart from the identity of who makes it.

In fact, I am judging Chait's idea on its merits. It just so happens that his idea, that Obama should be dismissive of the concerns of women, people of color, and gay people, amounts to a defense of white, male privilege in politics and government. And that would still be true even if the person making the argument weren't a white man.

--Ann Friedman

As of yet, no cabinet positions have been officially announced. But we've got a few "they've been picked and we're vetting them but we won't announce yet"-type leaks going forward, which I will assemble in the following chart for your perusal. An asterisk means it's not even at the level of officially unofficial rumor, it's just what feels right according to my reporting/gut instinct:

Secretary of State: Hillary Clinton

Secretary of Treasury: Tim Geithner*

Secretary of Defense: Robert Gates*

Attorney General: Eric Holder

Secretary of HHS: Tom Daschle

Secretary of Homeland Security: Janet Napolitano

Secretary of Commerce: Penny Pritzker* (I hear this is not a done deal.)

Secretary of Veterans Affairs: Tammy Duckworth*

Secretary of Education: Linda Darling-Hammond*

Chief of Staff: Rahm Emanuel

Director of OMB: Peter Orszag

National Security Advisor: Jim Steinberg*

EPA Administrator:?

Secretary of Agriculture: ?

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: ?

Secretary of the Interior:?

Secretary of Labor: ?

Secretary of Transportation: ?

Thus far, it's an interesting and talented cabinet with the capacity for success. Identity politics-wise, there seems to be good representation for women, if not necessarily minorities, but there's time and positions left. Does it look like America to you?

--Tim Fernholz

Some conservatives had a really hard time watching John McCain lose. That's okay. Liberals, after losing two elections to George W. Bush, can relate. But some people are having a harder time coping than others. For example, before the election, Bill O'Reilly was clinging desperately to the faint hope that every poll showing Obama ahead in a particular state was subject to about a ten point Bradley Effect:

This looks absurd now, but it did even then, and Kos had a great time making fun of it. But hey, predictions are predictions, and everyone's wrong sometimes. But you really get the impression O'Reilly is having some closure issues looking at the map that's currently on his website, via Spencer Ackerman:

Basically, in the alternate universe known as "The No Spin Zone" North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana and Nevada haven't been called yet. I believe this is the stage of grief known as "denial".

--A. Serwer

Michael Kinsley needs to retain his reputation has a witty contrarian, so today he has a column arguing that we should all stop being so uptight about whether or not Obama is smoking and just let him have a toke. In fact, Kinsley assumes that Obama is smoking mad jacks anyway:

Now, I have been enjoying Obama euphoria as much as anyone. Without it, the prospect would be depressing indeed. But where is the skepticism? If Obama actually has accomplished the miracle of giving up cigarettes at the apogee of a presidential race, he should be happy to let us know this and add to his superman image. And if he hasn't? Well, if he is straight with us about it, we should forgive him. So he's not a superman. Neither are we. In a democracy, that is a good thing for ruler and ruled to know they have in common. Furthermore, as presidential vices go, this one is not near the top. As for being a role model for youths, Obama's good habits outweigh this single bad one. He's great on hydration, apparently.

[...]

Another question is what effect a president desperate for a cigarette and trying to quit might have on your life expectancy and mine. Obama's steely calm is now one of our country's major assets. If he needs an occasional cigarette to preserve it, let's hand him an ashtray, offer him a light and look the other way.

Now, this column may seem trivial in light of the news that the health insurance industry is interested in discussing mandates, Janet Napolitano potentially being our next head of Homeland Security (Napolitano was impeccably profiled by our own Dana Goldstein earlier this year), and the tone deafness of auto executives that may have just doomed their industry, but ... no, wait, it does seem trivial.

But maybe the most irritating thing about the column -- and I say this as a former smoker -- is that if Kinsley actually thought Obama should be allowed to keep smoking unmolested, he wouldn't have drawn attention to it by writing a whole column about how he's probably smoking anyway and how we shouldn't care, thus making the subject of Obama's smoking a topic of discussion.

--A. Serwer

• The Obama transition team has announced a slew of policy directors, the most prominent being Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle who will also reportedly be head of Health and Human Services and White House health czar. Ezra nails the relevance of the pick: "Daschle signals that the Obama administration view health care as a political problem." Precisely. Wonkish details are intellectually interesting but at the end of the day you gotta pass the bill and that's what Daschle is equipped to do.
• In other transition news, the Obama team has tapped CBO Director Peter Orszag for budget director, and possibly Max Cleland or Tammy Duckworth for Secretary of Veterans Affairs or Secretary of the Army. Obama also appears to be negotiating to keep Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary, at least short-term, and Arlen Specter tells First Read that the Holder appointment would be news to him (it's unusual for the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to be in the dark, historically).
• Hillary Clinton's close to $8 million in campaign debt from her presidential run may become a problem if she accepts a position as Secretary of State, since she'd have to raise funds while serving in the administration, a potential ethics violation. On the other hand, becoming SoS might give her a compelling case to ask the FEC to forgive the debts. In other Hillary news, Ted Kennedy offers Clinton the chance to head the Senate's health care working group if she doesn't go to Foggy Bottom.
• The House Democratic Steering Committee narrowly nominated Henry Waxman over John Dingell to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Tim explains what this means.
  
• John McCain has announced that he will run for reelection in 2010 although, as Dana notes, he might face real competition in Arizona from Gov. Janet Napolitano.
• Delaware's Democratic Governor-elect Jack Markell plans on being sworn in at midnight on January 20, which would allow him to name Joe Biden's replacement if the vice president-elect resigns his Senate seat after being sworn in.
• The Minnesota recount begins today and will determine whether Norm Coleman will retain his Senate seat or lose it to Al Franken. Yesterday, Mark Begich prevailed over Ted Stevens in Alaska, giving the Democrats 58 seats for the 111th Congress. In other election remainders, Missouri -- and its 11 electoral votes -- is finally being called for McCain, and Salt Lake City went for Barack Obama by 296 votes, even thought the state as a whole went for McCain by 29 points.
• A Willacy County, Texas, grand jury has indicted vice president Richard Cheney and former AG Alberto Gonzales over use of a detention facility, even though the county has no federal jurisdiction. Will Bunch has the background on the case.
• And finally, in its ongoing efforts to prove that America truly is a center-right nation, Newsweek probes the serious question of whether Barack Obama is indeed the Antichrist. Hey, maybe next week they can do a Q & A with Alan Keyes regarding his quest to get Barack Obama to provide his birth records prior to being inaugurated!

--Mori Dinauer

From National Review, Shelby Steele can't let it go:

Everywhere I went on my book tour, young people would come up. “We’re beyond your generation,” they would tell me. “We grew up differently than you did.” No, I tell them, you didn’t. You did not. You are now obsessed with race. Race is the only thing that’s driving your interest in Barack Obama. You couldn’t even tell me what his policies are. You’re never critical of him in any way. If you were free of race you would not judge him culturally. You would judge him politically. You just -- you are consumed by race.

Steele is the author of the following books:

A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.

A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America.

The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America.

If only you race-obsessed maniacs would stop being infatuated with race, Shelby Steele could stop writing books about it.

--A. Serwer

P.S. Please feel free to visit our Steele disambiguation page.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point you to Eve Fairbank's smart analysis of the House GOP leadership elections:

In a political moment when Republicans are bitterly split between the vanishing moderates, who believe that embracing their centrism is the only way to save the party, and the ascendant conservatives, who are itching to repurify the party along right-wing principles, Boehner maintains power - for now - by dancing between the two poles. "Boehner stays because he's acceptable to both sides -- the hard-core [conservatives] and the non-hard-cores," explains another Republican staffer. It's a pivot even Rahm, a former male ballerina, could envy.

In answering the question of why Boehner is still leader -- which baffled even veteran Democratic operatives, who felt, reasonably enough, that losing fifty seats in two years is a firing offense -- Fairbanks also explains why Boehner is not a very effective leader. Balanced between two poles of his caucus but not really asserting control over either, it's going to be hard for the tan, cigarette smoking* congressman to really move his caucus on legislation. Consider the example of the bailout bill, where, in the act of trying to have it both ways, Boehner let his caucus destroy the bill's chance of passing on the first vote, breaking his promise to the Democratic leadership that he would find enough votes to put the bailout over the top. While Boehner remains the face of the caucus, the rest of the new leadership is quite a bit further right than the previous session, suggesting a very obstinate minority that won't necessarily be swayed by their leader's blandishments.

-- Tim Fernholz

*According to my contract as a Washington-based journalist, I have to mention that Boehner has a tan and smokes every time I write about him. Weird, huh?

More news from the transition ...

Senior Advisor to the President: David Axelrod. Que sorpresa!

White House Counsel: Gregory Craig. Discussed here.

Staff Secretary: Lisa Brown. A former counsel to the Vice President under Al Gore, Brown was most recently executive director of the American Constitution Society, essentially the liberal answer to the Federalist Society. The position of staff secretary involves managing the president's paperwork and communication; it's not a lightweight job and requires a light touch and the ability to manage competing agendas. One former White House staff secretary? Current transition head John Podesta held the job during Bill Clinton's first term.

Cabinet Secretary: Chris Lu. Now the executive director of the transition, Lu was Obama's legislative director in the Senate and had worked for Henry Waxman's House Government Oversight committee. He is also, I believe, a former law school classmate of the president-elect. The cabinet secretary job is similar to the staff secretary but involves policy coordination between various executive agencies.

--Tim Fernholz

Via Jon Chait, Ross Douthat talks about how Obama may guard his right flank with foreign policy:

Here's a fearless prediction: On an awful lot of issues, the Obama foreign policy will end cutting to the right of Bill Clinton's foreign policy, which was already more center-left than left. Even with the GOP brand in the toilet, Republicans are still trusted as much or more than Dems on foreign policy, mostly for somewhat nebulous "toughness" reasons. So why give the Right a chance to play what's just about its only winning card, when you can satisfy your base with a phased withdrawal from Iraq that's scheduled to happen anyway while waxing hawkish on Pakistan, Afghanistan ... and who knows, maybe Iran as well? (I have a sneaking suspicion that a President Obama will be slightly more likely to authorize airstrikes against Iran than a President McCain would have been.) Meanwhile, on detainee policy, wiretapping, etc. you can earn plaudits from liberals for showily abandoning the worst excesses of the Bush era, while actually holding on to most of the post-9/11 powers that the Bushies claimed. Obama already made fans of Niall Ferguson and Eli Lake; by 2012, I wouldn't be surprised if he's converted Max Boot as well.

And with his right flank safely guarded (assuming, of course, that Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iran doesn't become his Administration's Iraq), he'll have that much more political for the big-ticket goals that will guarantee his place in the liberal pantheon - universal health care, a New Deal for energy policy, a succession of young liberal judges who will tilt the Supreme Court leftward for a generation, etc. Among right-wing hawks, there will be strange-new-respectful talk about Obama's centrist instincts, his Scoop Jackson-ish tendencies, his Reaganesque blend of idealism, pragmatism and strength. Meanwhile, the rest of the right-wing coalition will be getting steamrolled.

I'm not sure Ross is right here -- pun intended -- or rather, I think he's doing a little revisionist history. For starters, the two keystones of Obama's foreign policy that have drawn the most attention, withdrawing from Iraq and negotiating with states like Iran, are pretty much anathema to folks like Max Boot, and don't really represent the hard right at all. I'm not sure where Ross gets the idea that Obama will be more likely to launch missiles at Iran than McCain except that, having lost the presidential race, McCain won't be launching missiles at anyone. Of course, Obama has made clear that he won't tolerate a nuclear Iran, but it's equally clear that he's going to do everything he can -- and that Bush or McCain wouldn't do -- to make sure it doesn't come to that. Afghanistan may be the only example where Ross's analogy does hold true -- Obama has committed, thus far, to a pretty hawkish strategy of increasing troop strength. But I expect a lot of debate over that decision in the coming six months.

But if Ross is right, then I'm worried. Anyone else remember a liberal president who used military adventurism to shore up his right flank while enacting broad progressive domestic legislation? Why, Lyndon Johnson, of course, who inherited Vietnam from his predecessor and worried constantly that he'd appear weak even as it became increasingly clear that being in Vietnam was a bad policy. Eventually, as the story goes, it destroyed his presidency. Ross recognizes that Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran could become Obama's Iraq, and that would be disastrous to both his domestic agenda and his presidency. The problem is that Obama will create a foreign policy quagmire if if sticks to right-wing foreign policy choices. It's in his best interest to apply his pragmatic liberalism across the board. For more on what that means, check out Spencer's cover from last spring.

--Tim Fernholz

With Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services, it's safe to assume that some of the other policy working group leaders are also on the short lists --potentially, very short lists -- for cabinet positions. As Ezra writes, the news of Daschle at HHS, with a co-appointment to the White House as health policy adviser, is hugely encouraging to proponents of radical reform.

In comparison, the choice of Linda Darling-Hammond to lead the education working group is quite conservative. Not ideologically conservative, but rather, conservative in terms of what it says about Obama's plans for education. Groups like Democrats for Education Reform -- which favor charter schools and merit pay -- have been hoping for Obama to embrace their agenda. And indeed, early in the primaries, Obama was booed at a teachers' union event for saying he supported merit pay. But since he clinched the nomination, Obama's statements on education have been more circumspect. The appointment of Darling-Hammond, a teacher quality expert who opposes merit pay and is more critical than supportive of NCLB, signals that Obama wishes to avoid a fight with the unions. He'll spend his political capital on energy and health care instead.

All that said, Darling-Hammond, currently a Stanford professor, does have impressive qualifications and some great ideas. Known as a onetime harsh critic of Teach for America, she is absolutely correct to push for teacher recruitment reforms that professionalize the job and seek candidates ready to spend long careers in schools. She refers to education as a "civil right" and said on the campaign trail that the Obama team is committed to equalizing resources between poor and affluent schools. There may be education fights down the road in the Obama administration, but it's reductive to believe the only fight worth having is on merit pay, which pits certain progressive interest groups against one another. Darling-Hammond is unlikely to pick that particular fight -- but when it comes to school funding and other crucial issues, she'll be a powerful advocate on behalf of poor children.

--Dana Goldstein

Brian Beutler reports that the House steering committee has voted 25-22 to recommend Rep. Henry Waxman replace Rep. John Dingell as chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. It was a close vote, but still a surprising victory for the insurgent Waxman. Short background: Dingell and Waxman have clashed on climate change issues, with Dingell, who represents Detroit, supporting automakers and Waxman more intent on reform. ThinkProgress has a good breakdown here.

On the advice of some in-the-know sources, I had predicted earlier that Waxman would be in trouble when it comes to the full vote thanks to the more moderate character of the newer member classes, but I'd love to be wrong. Following up after today's vote, a few things come up:

One, the Steering Committee may not be as representative of the caucus as a whole as we like to think. Although Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been especially careful not to take a position on the fight, her close allies, like George Miller, are inclined to support Waxman. Pelosi allies obviously have an edge on the Steering Committee, which is made up of the various House leaders. A close win there could be a close loss for Waxman in the caucus.

Two, things have changed in the last five days, with Waxman's whip operation being much more aggressive in reaching out to members. Dingell, confined to a wheelchair, has not been courting members in gatherings like yesterday's leadership elections with as much energy as his challenger.

Three, hypothetical vote counting aside, tomorrow's vote is a secret ballot. Many members who might owe Dingell a favor or be somewhat worried about Waxman's approach might vote for a new chairman simply because, well, it's a change election. Whereas last week I was hearing nothing but bad news for Waxman, this week there has been shifting, with some people suggesting he may well pull it out. As Buetler notes, today's vote could well be a harbinger of that trend.

--Tim Fernholz

-

Mike Huckabee on The View, offers his reasons why gays haven't crossed "the civil rights threshold."

HUCKABEE: It’s a different set of rights. People who are homosexuals should have every right in terms of their civil rights, to be employed, to do anything they want. But that’s not really the issue. I know you talked about it and I think you got into it a little bit early on. But when we’re talking about a redefinition of an institution, that’s different than individual civil rights.

BEHAR: Well, segregation was an institution, too, in a way. It was right there on the books.

HUCKABEE: But here is the difference. Bull Connor was hosing people down in the streets of Alabama. John Lewis got his skull cracked on the Selma bridge.

Huckabee is taking advantage of a comparative overreach by people who explicitly compare the gay rights movement to the civil rights movement when the comparison isn't appropriate. Gays have actually been the been the targets of some very high profile violent attacks, (Ali Frick points to Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard and Lawrence King, but there are many more) but the nature and historical contexts of each movement are very different. They are discrete experiences of oppression, and so should be discussed, when possible, without the crutch of an inappropriate comparison. The fight for LGBTQ rights is in and of itself just even without a historical link to the fight for black rights.

Nor does it really matter. Huckabee did not have to get hosed down or his skull cracked to have the right to marry his wife, and instituting some arbitrary threshold of violence that non-heterosexuals have to meet before they can claim the same rights as all other citizens is fundamentally un-American.

But Huckabee is a shrewd fellow who is well versed in the civil rights movement, and seems to have a rapport with black folks most Republicans lack. It's no secret that some Republicans believe their opportunity to drive a wedge in the progressive coalition lies within the conservative religious beliefs of minorities. So his aim here is to make the argument not about whether the denial of marriage rights to gays are unjust, but whether gays have really suffered as much as black folks in the pursuit of their rights. It is an attempt to start a whole new kind of culture war between blacks and gays over the authenticity of suffering in the aftermath of tensions over Prop 8.

The problem with Huckabee's reasoning is that no one should have to suffer in claiming the rights that should be afforded to them as American citizens. Huckabee recognizes the nobility of black folks who fought to be recognized as human beings and full citizens without acknowledging the underlying fact that the hypocrisy of American bigotry made that fight necessary. And it still does. There's no need for a scorecard of assaults to make the case for gay rights, gay people have earned their rights simply by virtue of being American citizens. It shouldn't take the vile intolerance of a Bull Connor to make that obvious.

--A. Serwer

The Obama-Biden transition announces it's policy team leaders today, list below and bios after the jump:

Economic: Daniel K. Tarullo

Education: Linda Darling-Hammond

Energy and Environment: Carol M. Browner

Health Care: Senator Tom Daschle

Immigration: T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar

National Security: James B. Steinberg, Dr. Susan E. Rice

Technology, Innovation and Government Reform: Sonal Shah, Julius Genachowski, Blair Levin

These folks are essentially in charge of taking Obama's campaign promises and turning them into actionable public policy, in part by determining whether the appropriate route is legislative or administrative. Not a lot of surprises on the list; Daschle has been awaiting his chance at health care for a while now, Steinberg and Rice are expected to be National Security Advisor and Deputy, and Tarullo has been advising the Obama campaign for some time now on international economic issues. Techies will be impressed with Google's Shah. And Darling-Hammond may be a disappointment for education reformers, who have been unhappy with her "conventional" views on issues like merit pay, according to Time magazine.

-- Tim Fernholz

P.S. A lil' love for my Alma Mater's law school, with Tarullo and Aleinikoff both hailing from Georgetown. Hoya Saxa, your life is awesome.

ECONOMIC:

Daniel K. Tarullo is Professor of Law at Georgetown University. He teaches and writes in the areas of banking law, international economic regulation, and economic policymaking. From 1993 to 1998 he was, successively, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs, Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, and Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy. From 1995 to 1998 he was also President Clinton’s personal representative to the G7/G8 group of industrialized nations. Prior to joining the Administration, he practiced law, served on the staff of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and taught at Harvard Law School.

EDUCATION:

Linda Darling-Hammond

Linda Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University where she has launched the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and the School Redesign Network. Her research, teaching, and policy work focus on issues of school reform, teaching quality and educational equity. She is a former president of the American Educational Research Association and member of the executive board of the National Academy of Education. She has been a leader in the standards movement, chairing both the New York State Curriculum and Assessment Council as it adopted new standards and assessments for students and the Interstate New Teachers Support and Assessment Council (INTASC) as it developed new standards for teachers. From 1994-2001, she served as executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a blue-ribbon panel whose 1996 report, What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future, was named in 2006 as one of the most influential affecting U.S. education, and Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation’s ten most influential people affecting educational policy. She received her BA from Yale University, magna cum laude, in 1973 and her Doctorate in Urban Education from Temple University in 1978. She began her career as a public school teacher.

ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT:

Carol M. Browner

Carol M. Browner is the longest serving Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency serving from 1993 to 2001. Prior to that, she served as Florida Secretary of the Environment. Browner is a founder and principal of The Albright Group LLC, a global strategy firm and of Albright Capital Management, an investment advisory firm that focuses on emerging markets. Browner serves as the chair of the National Audubon Society Board of Directors, and sits on the Board of Directors of APX, the Alliance for Climate Protection, the Center for American Progress and the League of Conservation Voters.

HEALTH CARE:

Senator Tom Daschle

Currently, Senator Tom Daschle is an advisor to the law firm of Alston and Bird, where he provides strategic advice on public policy issues such as climate change, energy, health care, trade, financial services, and telecommunications. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University and a public speaker. In 2007, he joined with former Majority Leaders George Mitchell, Bob Dole, and Howard Baker to create the Bipartisan Policy Center, an organization dedicated to finding common ground on some of the pressing public policy challenges of our time. He is also Co-Chair of the ONE Vote ’08 Campaign, along with former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, to address health and poverty in the developing world in a more aggressive and successful way.

Daschle was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978, serving eight years. In 1986, Daschle was elected to the U.S. Senate. Two years later he became the first Co-Chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and the first South Dakotan to be elected to a leadership position in the U.S. Congress. In 1994, Daschle was elected by his colleagues as their Democratic Leader. Daschle is one of the longest-serving Senate Democratic Leaders in history and the only one to serve twice as both Majority and Minority Leader.

IMMIGRATION:

T. Alexander Aleinikoff

T. Alexander Aleinikoff has been Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center and Executive Vice President of Georgetown University since July 2004. He has been a member of the Georgetown faculty since 1997. Dean Aleinikoff served as General Counsel and Executive Associate Commissioner for Programs at the Immigration and Naturalization Service for several years during the Clinton Administration. From 1997 to 2004 he was a Senior Associate at the Migration Policy Institute, where he now serves on the Board of Trustees. He has written widely on immigration, refugee and citizenship law and constitutional law. Dean Aleinikoff is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Yale Law School.

Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar is Professor and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School. His work focuses on how organizations manage complex regulatory, migration, international security, and criminal justice problems. During the Clinton Administration he served at Treasury as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Enforcement, where he worked on countering domestic and international financial crime, improving border coordination, and enhancing anti-corruption measures. He has served on the boards of numerous organizations, including Asylum Access and the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. He has testified before Congress on immigration policy and separation of powers, and was appointed to the Silicon Valley Blue Ribbon Task Force on Aviation Security. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

NATIONAL SECURITY:

James B. Steinberg

James B. Steinberg is dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs (2006-present) and is a former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Clinton (1996-2000). His previous positions include vice president and director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution (2001-2005), director of the Policy Planning Staff (1994-1996) and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Regional Analysis in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (1993-1994) at the U.S. Department of State. He is the author of and contributor to many books on foreign policy and national security topics, including, most recently, with Kurt Campbell, Difficult Transitions: Foreign Policy Troubles at the Outset of Power.

Dr. Susan E. Rice

Dr. Susan E. Rice served most recently as a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Obama for America campaign while on leave from the Brookings Institution where she is a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development Programs. Rice currently serves on the Obama-Biden Transition Project Advisory Board. From 1997-2001, she was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Prior to that, Rice served in the White House at the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs and as Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping. Rice was previously a management consultant at McKinsey and Company. She received her B.A. in History with Honors from Stanford University and her M.Phil. and D.Phil. (Ph.D.) degrees in International Relations from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION & GOVERNMENT REFORM:

Blair Levin

Blair Levin is a Managing Director of Stifel Nicolaus and serves as the firm’s principal telecom, media and tech regulatory and strategy analyst. Prior to his work as an analyst, Mr. Levin served as Chief of Staff to Chairman Reed Hundt at the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 through 1997. Before joining the FCC, Levin was a partner in the North Carolina law firm of Parker Poe, Poe, Adams and Bernstein.

Sonal Shah

Sonal Shah heads Google.org’s global development efforts. Prior to joining Google, she was Vice President at Goldman, Sachs and Co. developing and implementing the firm’s environmental policy. She is also the co-founder of Indicorps, a U.S.-based non-profit organization offering one-year fellowships Indian-Americans to work on development projects in India. Sonal also worked at the Center for American Progress on trade, outsourcing and post conflict issues and the Center for Global Development on development policy issues. Sonal worked at the Department of Treasury from 1995-2002 on various economic issues and regions of the world, including Bosnia, Kosovo, the Asian crisis and sub-Saharan Africa. During that time she also worked at the National Security Council from 1998-1999. Sonal received her BA in economics from the University of Chicago and her MA in economics from Duke University. She is on the Obama-Biden Transition Project Advisory Board.

Julius Genachowski

Julius Genachowski is co-founder of Rock Creek Ventures and LaunchBox Digital, a special advisor at General Atlantic, and a member of various boards of directors and advisors. From 1997 to 2005, he was a senior executive at IAC/InterActiveCorp, where his roles included Chief of Business Operations, General Counsel, and a member of the Office of the Chairman. Genachowski served at the Federal Communications Commission from 1994 to 1997, including as Chief Counsel to the Chairman. >From 1991 to 1994 he served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter, to U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. (ret.), and to Chief Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He worked in Congress from 1985 to 1988, for Sen. Charles E. Schumer (then a U.S. Representative), and for the joint select committe on the Iran-Contra Affair. He is a on the Obama-Biden Transition Project Advisory Board.

Andy McCarthy's dissatisfaction with the Iraq SOFA agreement has been earning some contempt, but like Eric Martin I found it rather refreshing. Unlike so many of his conservative brethren, McCarthy realizes that what the Bush administration has wrought is defeat; no permanent bases, a democracy that's shaky at best, an Iraqi populace that despises the United States, and an improved strategic situation for Iran. At a time when the conservative blogosphere is shaking its little fists and shrieking "VICTORY!!11!!!11", McCarthy's stance amounts to a relatively clear-headed voice of reason.

--Robert Farley

One thing about this whole economic stimulus postponement is that there are still people out there worried about footing the bill for the necessary investment programs needed to beat the current recession. Though a majority on the left have bought into the reasonable idea of short-term deficit spending to beat a recession followed by a longer term approach to a balanced budget and paying down the debt. But there are folks (Tom Brokaw among them) who seem to think that between the financial rescue bill and any moderate stimulus that may come down the pike before Jan. 20, the new administration’s fiscal hands will be tied. Not so! Yesterday, I saw a briefing by John Irons of EPI, and here are some of his graphs for our edification.

The above graph charts deficits from 1955 to 2008. Note: The deficit in 1992 was much larger, as a percentage of GDP, than the deficit that Obama will inherit. Not even to mention the Reagan deficits of the nineteen eighties.

This graph shows a more relevant measure, the federal debt held by the public as a share of the overall economy. (The future numbers are just estimates). The current debt level is below the average of the last 65 years and the average of the 1990s. An increase in debt would not create an unstable economic situation.

This last graph doesn’t really have much to do with our argument but I think it’s interesting to track the tax revenue from corporations as opposed to other revenue streams. Social insurance taxes clearly provide more revenue than corporate taxes, which seems more than a little regressive.

Anyways, Irons says that between current spending levels, the financial rescue bill, and a weakening economy, a deficit of 5 percent of GDP is possible in 2009. But part of this deficit comes from the struggling economy (he estimates $370 billion), and we can expect to gain back a good part of our investments from the rescue bill. Ultimately, given that debt levels are at historical norms and that we can expect to see two to three years of weakness in the labor market, Irons concludes that, “the current fiscal situation should not be seen as a critical barrier to expanded investments in the economy.”

Whew!

--Tim Fernholz

An anonymous group of anti-choicers are trying to derail Michael "Drill, Baby, Drill" Steele's campaign for RNC chair, reports David Brody. Now, this is strange. Michael Steele identifies as pro-life and, during his failed Senate race, was endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee. And not only is he a pro-lifer, he's an African American pro-lifer. That's important to Christian conservatives, who teach their children that black babies are the primary victims of the abortion "genocide." The movement regularly likens abortion to slavery.

So what's the problem with Steele? Apparently, the issue is his former membership in the socially moderate Republican Leadership Council, which he founded with former Senator and U.N. Ambassador John Danforth, who opposes abortion rights, and Christine Todd Whitman, who supports them. The RLC accepts debate and disagreement on social issues, and believes the Republican Party should do the same:

RLC-PAC's vision is a Republican Party that is unified by the basic tenets of fiscal responsibility and personal freedom, but that allows for diverse opinions on social issues by its members.

RLC-PAC members consider themselves True Conservative Republicans. Republicans who believe that our elected officials have a responsibility to their constituents to spend their money wisely. We believe that government should have a limited role in American’s personal lives. And we believe in a strong national defense.

We'll have to wait and see if this campaign against Steele sticks. The attack is already up and running on the most prominent anti-choice websites.

--Dana Goldstein

Al Qaeda plays a little identity politics:

In al-Qaida's first response to Obama's victory, al-Zawahri also called the president-elect, along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, "house negroes."

Speaking in Arabic, al-Zawahri uses the term "abeed al-beit," which literally translates as "house slaves." But al-Qaida supplied English subtitles of his speech that included the translation as "house negroes."

The message also includes old footage of speeches by Malcolm X in which he explains the term, saying black slaves who worked in their white masters' house were more servile than those who worked in the fields. Malcolm X used the term to criticize black leaders he accused of not standing up to whites.

The best part about this is that a knee-jerk patriotic response implicitly rejects the notion of black American culture as oppositional by definition. And doing so is an act of solidarity with the future President of the United States!

There's been a lot of skepticism about an Obama victory shifting the Muslim world's view of the United States, but judging by this statement at the very least it's made Al Qaeda's efforts to develop a compelling rhetorical indictment of America visibly more difficult.

--A. Serwer

In an article from our forthcoming print issue, Dayo Olopade reviews the mound of briefing books various groups have prepared in attempt to set a policy agenda for president-elect Obama:

No fewer than 20 progressive think tanks, issue groups, media outlets, and ad-hoc coalitions have already or will soon release presidential transition plans. These open letters to the next president boast sweeping and ambitious titles: "Investing in America's Future"; Mandate for Change; "Opportunity '08"; Rebooting America; "Making Sense"; "Transitions in Governance" -- as do their sponsors: the Campaign for America's Future, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Progressive Policy Institute, the New America Foundation, USAction, the journal Democracy, the Brookings Institution. Even the Heritage Foundation has a "to-do list." (Don't try to mix and match.) "There will be dozens and dozens of these things," says Peter Wallison, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute once rumored to be on the shortlist for a McCain Cabinet.

And Sarah Posner has the latest on the religious right:

In the bowels of the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Washington last Friday, as the G20 met across town and the Republican Governors' Association assembled in Florida, the activist elites of the conservative movement gathered to plot their resurgence. The Council for National Policy (CNP), founded in the early 1980s by the power brokers who brought together cold warriors, moral majoritarians, John Birchers, dispensationalists, anti-government libertarians, free-enterprise zealots, and national-security hawks under one roof, has long been the incubator for the conservative movement's political strategy, and an essential stop for Republican presidential aspirants.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

If Newsweek's Michael Isikoff is correct that Obama has offered Eric Holder the attorney general appointment, there will be musings about what will become of the two women rumored to have been on the shortlist for the job, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan.

When it comes to Napolitano, whom I profiled for our July print issue, in-the-know Democrats will see this as for the best. If she were to leave Arizona before her term expires in 2010, the Republican secretary of state, Jan Brewer, would become governor. With Arizona seen as a key state in the emerging Democratic majority, national Democrats don't want this to happen. Instead, Napolitano will likely serve out her term and make a play for John McCain's Senate seat in 2010. (Yesterday, McCain said he is planning on running for re-election). Brewer will run for governor, possibly against Democrat Phil Gordon, the mayor of Phoenix. Another Arizonan with gubernatorial hopes is Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio,  a Republican known for his harsh, almost nativist stance toward immigrants.

As for Kagan, she could still be tapped for a high-up Justice Department position, or potentially even the Supreme Court.

--Dana Goldstein

• As expected, Joe Lieberman will be staying in the Democratic caucus and retaining his Homeland Security chair, his only punishment being the loss of the chairmanship of a less consequential subcommittee. According to Howard Dean, this was largely the result of the intervention of Barack Obama -- the DNC chair said Obama "called the shots, and that's fine." I'd say that both Marc Ambinder and Mike Tomasky have the right take on this: The Democratic/Obama agenda is too big to waste time on the relatively minor issue of Lieberman and to understand the nature of the Lieberman dilemma is to understand Senate itself -- a very exclusive club that doesn't take expulsion lightly.
  
• The Washington Post has a great piece on Bush administration appointees "burrowing" into non-political positions within the federal bureaucracy, making them very difficult to remove.
• Michael Isikoff reports in Newsweek that Obama has decided to name Washington lawyer and former Clinton deputy AG Eric Holder for Attorney General. Tim and Adam have more on the pros and cons of a Holder appointment. Meanwhile, Jake Tapper calls Hillary Clinton for SoS almost a done deal, citing Democratic sources who say the formal announcement could come as early as next week. Glenn Thrush is more cautious, saying Clinton is "conflicted" over the decision.
• Mark Murray reports that Chuck Schumer will step down from his post as head of the DSCC and be replaced by heir-apparent Bob Menendez. On the other side of the aisle, Carrie Dann reports, "Big Bad" John Cornyn will ascend to top of the NRSC.
• As Georgia gears up for a runoff rumble between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin, the state continues to host high-profile surrogates, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Mitt Romney. Early voting has begun in the state, even drawing some lines at polling stations.
• Barack Obama made a surprise video appearance at the Governors Global Climate Summit, promising action and urging cooperation.
• Beau Biden, long groomed to replace his father in the Delaware Senate, has declined to fill the vacancy, even as he prepares for a tour in Iraq. Chris Cillizza has a roundup of the possible replacements on the Dem bench and potential Republican challengers.
• And finally, Sarah Palin is the first confirmed speaker at the 2009 CPAC convention in Washington D.C.. Based on what I saw at CPAC this year, she's likely to achieve demigod status amongst the participants next February.

--Mori Dinauer

Whatever one makes of conflicting media reports regarding the Obama Administration's likely position on torture, if Michael Isikoff is correct in reporting that Eric Holder will be the new Attorney General it's probably a good sign that Obama really does intend to abandon the Bush torture policy.

Via Spencer Ackerman, Mark Halperin provides a release from the American Constitution Society highlighting Holder's record:

Eric H. Holder Jr., Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton administration, asserted in a speech to the American Constitution Society (ACS) that the United States must reverse “the disastrous course” set by the Bush administration in the struggle against terrorism by closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, declaring without qualification that the U.S. does not torture people, ending the practice of transferring individuals involuntarily to countries that engage in torture and ceasing warrantless domestic surveillance.

“Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the ‘War on Terror' have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe,” Holder told a packed room at the ACS 2008 Convention on Friday evening. “For the sake of our safety and security, and because it is the right thing to do, the next president must move immediately to reclaim America's standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights.”

“We owe the American people a reckoning. It is our responsibility as citizens to preserve and protect our constitution… Let me be clear: I firmly believe that there is evil in the world, and that we still face grave dangers to our security. But our ability to lead the world in combatting these dangers depends not only on the strength of our military leadership but our moral leadership as well. … To recapture it, we can no longer allow ourselves to be ruled by fear. We must evaluate our policies and our practices in the harsh light of day and steel ourselves to face the world’s dangers in accord with the rule of law.”

Pretty good stuff. Of course, Isikoff may be jumping the gun. If that's the case, hopefully Holder's views on torture are consistent with the other candidates being considered.

Michael Isikoff says Eric Holder will be the Obama administration's Attorney General. Isikoff is a well-sourced fellow, but I still take this with a large grain of salt -- and urge you to do the same -- as the Newsweek macher also mentions that Holder has not been vetted yet, and a lot can happen during that process. Others close to the transition team say to be cautious, and the transition itself has no comment.

But, let's consider the facts. Holder has been on everyone's radar for the position, as he's got the experience (Clinton Deputy AG, appointed a Judge by Ronald Reagan), the private practice chops (Covington & Burling partner) and the Obama loyalty -- he headed, along with Caroline Kennedy, Obama's Vice-Presidential search, arguably one of the most successful parts of the presidential campaign.

Drawbacks? Well, Holder did play a minor negative role in the controversial Marc Rich pardon situation, but reports suggest that's a sin of omission rather than commission. Which, admittedly, will not prevent Senate Republicans from going off on the topic during his confirmation hearings.

Benefits? Most important, Holder seems like he would do a good job in the position; Dylan Matthews notes via e-mail that he's a strong opponent of torture and other Bush administration overreaches. It's a prominent position for an African-American in the cabinet. And it frees up other potential Attorney General nominees, specifically Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano and Alabama Representative Artur Davis, for either another cabinet post (Napolitano is also mentioned for Homeland Security) or, more likely at this point, running for Senate (or maybe Governor, in Davis' case) in their respective states in 2010, continuing to deepen the Democratic bench and improve the Senate majority.

What do you all think about Holder?

-- Tim Fernholz

This week's round-up considers alternative health care models, the immigrant experience in Philadelphia, forthcoming Defense budget fights and leading indicators of our economic crisis. In short, TTR runs the gamut!

• With comparison comes revelation. The journal Health Affairs published a study last week that surveyed chronically ill adults in the U.S. and seven other industrialized nations (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the U.K.). It compared their experiences of hospitalization or serious illness among a range of insurance designs and primary care models. U.S. patients were at a particularly high risk of forgoing recommended care -- like taking medicine or scheduling specialized appointments -- because of costs. They also experienced less efficient, poorly-organized care; and had to cope with more errors, such as getting the wrong medication or failing to receive prompt notice of abnormal test results. The report, highlighting the need for revision of the U.S. system, concludes with suggested innovations for improving patient outcomes everywhere. -- DH
• Illadelphia studies. Brookings digested thirty-plus years of research in a new report on immigration to Philadelphia. The key finding -- as in most reports on recent immigration trends -- is that foreign-born residents have swollen the metropolitan area in the 21st century. But instead of belaboring the stresses this can cause a city, the authors emphasize immigrants' "infusion of cosmopolitanism" and encourage the development of city infrastructure to better serve this burgeoning population. With special sections on refugees, South Philly, suburbia, health workers, and taxi drivers, this 40-pager explains why, how, when, from where, and what it means that immigration took hold of once-Anglo Philadelphia. -- CP
• Good cop, bad cop [PDF]. In a Center for Strategic and International Studies report, Anthony Cordesman and Hans Kaeser delve into the defense budgetary crisis that President-elect Obama will inevitably face. The Bush administration has more or less neglected the increased costs of manpower, maintenance, procurement, and contracts that naturally accompany engagement in two wars. The authors conclude that Obama's fiscal program will presumably involve axing (or scalpeling, if you will) large portions of the defense budget, much to the chagrin of many in the defense community. The Army's Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter (ARH), the Air Force's Transformational Communications Satellite (TSAT), the Combat Search and Rescue Helicopter (CSAR), and the Aerial Refueling Tanker (KC-X) are four specific contract programs (totaling almost $70 billion) that will likely face downsizing due to funding cuts. These cuts should not be interpreted as defense cuts; rather, they will be attempts to clean up the "current administration's unfinished business." -- SW
• Movin' on up [PDF]. Income inequality matters, but economic mobility -- the increase in economic status over a lifetime -- is what you have to keep your eye on, according to a recent report from the Urban Institute. Even with income inequality rivaling that of the 1920s, the report argues that disparities in opportunities may be more powerfully reflected by the stagnation in economic mobility. The study shows that both relative and absolute mobility have remained essentially the same for the past two decades, even as the economy has undergone serious transformations and extended periods of high growth that have been particularly rewarding for the wealthiest Americans. -- ZA
  

--TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
11/12/08
11/4/08

This morning's activity was a Campaign for America's Future-sponsored speaker series about public investments that included a number of interesting folks, including Representative Keith Ellison and economist James Galbraith. Predictably enough, both speakers discussed the importance of increased investment in infrastructure to rebuilding the economy and rebuilding our country. (Here's an EPI report [PDF] talking about what that would look like.) While the numbers are large -- and getting larger -- the economic crisis makes them extremely necessary. I'll also have a post -- with graphs! -- that explains why it won't be a huge deficit problem, either.

Galbraith's keynote speech was quite good, dealing with the causes of the economic crisis and what kind of work needs to be done to fix it. Some of the ideas are familiar -- a moratorium on home foreclosures for example -- and others more novel, like lowering the medicareaid entrance age to 55, which would move health care costs of the books of corporations like GM and onto the public roll. He also suggested increasing social security benefits and state-federal revenue sharing, two approaches that have not been used since the era of that dreaded liberal, Richard Nixon.

"I have already spent somewhere in the range of $400 to $450 billion without breaking a sweat," he said at one point in the discussion, "I tell you it won’t be enough. ... Suspend half the pay-roll tax. Let the government pay it for the next five years. ...This is not a time to be nervous about big numbers. Let’s now look beyond this year and ask what we have to do going forward. [What is required is] Public action on a sustained as well as substantial and speedy basis."

He also raised an interesting point I hadn't heard before on the subject of Amity Shlaes and other New Deal revisionists (for an authoritative video smackdown, see here). Referencing Richard Cohen's column today, Galbraith mentioned that the problem with Shlaes research is that she deliberately does not include public employees in her unemployment figures. Which is to say, she says the New Deal failed because it didn't lower the unemployment rate, and she can say that because she doesn't count all of the people hired by the government for public works projects as employed. Galbraith observed that, "Those who got up to work on the Tri-Borough bridge for years were very much under the illusion they were employed. And it was not a bridge to nowhere."

Bad news: None of the members of congress present, nor any that I've spoken to, are optimistic about passing anything before January 20.

--Tim Fernholz

UPDATE: The inimitable Eric Rauchway writes to note he's been on the Shlaes beat for sometime, and has a more comprehensive assessment of the revisionist approach to the New Deal, including the gaming-the-numbers explanation I hadn't heard before today. Shows what I know ...

I know I'm obsessing, but with this looking more and more likely, it's worth taking a step back to consider just how huge this is. Secretary of State is arguably the most prominent and prestigious Cabinet position. Potentially, it's a more powerful job than the vice presidency, and indeed, it's the role Joe Biden was supposedly lusting after. Those who argued Hillary should have been Obama's running mate -- and were so disappointed that she wasn't seriously vetted -- probably had little inkling that the Obama team had something like this in mind for her.

--Dana Goldstein

Barack Obama has promised an office of urban policy, but what will it look like? Dana explains:

There is a certain vogue gathering around urban issues. No -- not inner city poverty, crime, or joblessness -- but, rather, those issues that might broadly be described as ones of "human geography." Where do people live, where do they work, and how should they travel between the two? How can resources, ranging from good schools to public transit to clean air, be more fairly allocated within regions?

Such questions have long been the provenance of a small group of left planning theorists such as James Howard Kunstler and Jane Jacobs. Their calls for denser, urban development were motivated as much by aesthetic concerns as by economic and environmental ones. And while it's certainly true that strip malls and parking lots are eyesores, and that old buildings are often prettier than new ones, critics weren't totally off the mark when they accused these thinkers of snobbishness; of a certain lack of compassion for the typical postwar middle class family, lured by cheap real estate and good schools into a vastly expanding suburbia.

--The Editors

I've said that I'm cautiously optimistic about the likelihood that the Obama Administration will end Bush's policy of "enhanced interrogations," although less so since learning about Obama adviser John Brennan's past and his potential role in the Obama Administration. At the same time, I've argued that people shouldn't jump to the conclusion that he won't prohibit torture on the basis of conflicting press reports, as Eugene Robinson seems to assume today:

Obama's clarity on the issues of Guantanamo and torture stands in contrast to his necessary vagueness about how he will deal with the economic crisis. Torture is wrong today and will still be wrong tomorrow, whereas today's economic panacea can be tomorrow's drop in the bucket. Who would have thought that these "war on terror" issues would be the easy part for the new president?

Bush was just as "clear" in his public statements about torture declaring famously "we do not torture...we will aggressively pursue [terrorists], but we will do so under the law." The point is that public statements are important for drawing lines but are meaningless unless the same hard lines are drawn in policy and practice. To give Obama credit for having ended a policy of torture before he takes office is just as silly as claiming unequivocally that he has no intention of doing so. Giving Obama credit for doing the right thing before he does it eliminates the ability of torture opponents to pressure Obama to, in fact, do the right thing.

--A. Serwer

Ann Friedman calls out the pundits claiming that, unless Obama ignores minority groups, his presidency will fail:

During the Bush years, many pundits agreed that the Democratic Party had a "white man problem" -- that a Democrat would never win the presidency without more support from working-class white dudes. Just last year, David Paul Kuhn published The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, warning Democrats that, if they knew what was best for them, they'd stop kowtowing to women and people of color and start making overtures to the white men who really decide elections.

Except that, in 2008, John McCain won 57 percent of the white male vote. Last time I checked, he's not our president-elect. But that doesn't mean the warnings to Democrats have stopped. Now (mostly white, mostly male) commentators are arguing that unless Barack Obama can keep the Democratic Party's "identity groups" in check, he's going to have a hard time being a successful president.

And Paul Waldman argues Obama needs to find a balance between wonks and hacks that has eluded previous presidents if he wants to be a success:

A lot will change on Jan. 20, when George W. Bush takes one last wistful glance around the Oval Office before heading back to Texas, and a few thousand Republicans begin finding out whether having "former Bush administration official" on their resumé is a help or a hindrance in getting that next job. It's more than just a new set of policy goals and a round of executive orders undoing some of Bush's worst offenses. For the first time in eight long years, the federal government will be managed by people who have a clue about what they're doing.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

So I was sitting quietly at my desk when our web editor, Phoebe Connelly, came over to share the following thought on all the hand-wringing over whether Bill Clinton's international dealings will prevent Hillary from claiming the secretary of state appointment: Hillary has spent her whole life sacrificing for Bill and subsuming her own considerable talents and ambitions to his. It's time, finally, for Bill to do whatever he has to do to make this happen for Hill, including, potentially, shuttering his foundation's international work.

Provocative, considering the good work Clinton is doing around the world. But I'm inclined to agree: It's Hillary's turn.

--Dana Goldstein

Andrew Sullivan expresses frustration over Prince's homophobia:

Prop 8 has helped unearth the seething homophobia in much of black America. Even for a dandy, feminized midget like Prince. (Actually, black dandy, feminized midgets need to express more homophobia than most.)

No I'm just being silly. It's because he's black.

--A. Serwer

I received approximately 600 messages yesterday about this story:

A hijacked Saudi-owned supertanker carrying more than $100 million worth of crude oil is believed to have anchored off Somalia and its owners are working toward “the safe and speedy return” of the 25 crew, the owners said Tuesday.

A statement from Vela International, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based oil giant Saudi Aramco, said the company was “awaiting further contact from the pirates in control of the vessel” who seized it some 480 miles off the coast of Somalia. Earlier reports said the 1,080-foot Sirius Star had been hijacked off the Kenyan coast.

--Robert Farley

It looks like Senate Democrats have found a compromise on the issue of Joe Lieberman. The proposal that will be voted on today is that Lieberman loses a lesser subcommittee chairmanship but retains the more high-profile gig of Homeland Security Committee Chairman. My gut says that Lieberman should lose his position and basically be ostracized by his colleagues; what he did during the campaign was shameful, especially after Obama campaigned with him in his last dicey re-election. As Jon Chait points out, the situation is not without precedent, and the prior offenders lost their committees.

At the same time, though, I'm not inclined to lose a vote in the Senate -- either to the Republican caucus, or, if you think he wouldn't go that far, just to uncooperative pique. It's all very easy to get excited about revenge but at the end of the day I'm more excited passing progressive legislation, which needs to go through the Senate. Obviously the Senate Democratic majority has grown a good deal and sixty votes as a number doesn't matter as much as we like to think it does, but one more vote is one more vote. And I'm not sure his punishment would really have a lot of deterrent power -- are there many Democratic Senators who would undermine the party in the same way as Lieberman except for their worries of losing their seniority? In the end, the only purpose it serves is getting a little vengeance. Which is nice, but doesn't get us anywhere. So let's keep him in the caucus, give him a slap on the wrist ... and have the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fund a primary challenger in 2012. That's the ol' Joementum!

-- Tim Fernholz

• Barack Obama's meeting today with John McCain revealed little of how the two former rivals would work together, but Chris Cillizza has put together a reasonable list of political roles McCain could play until his Senate seat comes up for reelection in two years.
• It seems as though Obama has offered Hillary Clinton a post as Secretary of State, although the vetting of Bill Clinton's foundation funding sources is the biggest impediment at this point.
• On Capitol Hill, Sens. Byron Dorgan and Tom Carper have become the latest Democratic Senators, following Patrick Leahy and Independent Bernie Sanders, to call for punishing Sen. Joseph Lieberman for his behavior on the campaign trail. Given that the actual vote on Lieberman's fate will be a secret ballot, I'm pretty sure that Lieberman's not going anywhere until Connecticut gives him the boot in 2012.
• It appears that only half of the $700 billion in bailout money sought by the Bush administration will be used during the lame duck session, leaving Incoming president Obama with $350 billion to spend as he pleases, AP reports, although Treasury has denied this is the case.
• Sen. Ted Kennedy made an informal visit to the Hill to signal he's ready to work on comprehensive health care reform.
• Mike Huckabee has written a book called Do the Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America, to be released on Tuesday. For fans of politics as contact sport, the book has Huckabee going all Chuck Norris on many of his former presidential rivals: "Mitt Romney, Huckabee's principal rival in Iowa, receives the roughest treatment. Huckabee writes that the former Massachusetts governor's record was 'anything but conservative until he changed the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for president.' He notes that Romney declined to make a congratulatory phone call after Huckabee beat the odds to win the Iowa caucuses, 'which we took as a sign of total disrespect.'"
• The New York Times looks at the meltdown of National Review during the presidential race, and the departure of less doctrinaire figures like Christopher Buckley and David Frum. Dana hopes The Corner gets its act together and returns to "the model of a blog that fosters debate among its contributors," but I don't think that's quite the problem. Rather, The Corner needs to learn how to engage with serious debate among its competitors, i.e. other bloggers, lest it doom itself to irrelevance.
• Speaking of irrelevance, Rep. Eric Cantor, soon likely to be number two in the GOP House, says the Republican party is no longer relevant to voters. 
• And finally, Richard Perle is keeping the faith alive, telling Foreign Policy that he still holds out hope that there will be a square in Baghdad named after George W. Bush for the liberation of Iraq: "I think [Iraqis] will look back and say, we paid a terrible price, but it’s worth it."

--Mori Dinauer

NYT:

A high-ranking Chinese military official has hinted that China’s fast-growing navy is seeking to acquire an aircraft carrier, a move that would surely stoke tensions with the United States military and its allies in Asia.

Perhaps as important, China is looking for ways to stimulate its economy. Defense spending isn't as productive as other forms of investment, but if the CCP feels that it's over-saturating with further infrastructure investment, a general military buildup makes some sense. The USS Yorktown and USS Enterprise, after all, began life as part of the general economic stimulus pursued by FDR in his first term.

--Robert Farley

Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-“school choice” group generally skeptical of teachers’ unions, is circulating a petition asking the Obamas to consider public charter schools for Sasha and Malia. It’s safe to say this is unlikely; Michelle Obama has visited two private academies in Upper Northwest, D.C. -- Georgetown Day School and Sidwell Friends -- but no public schools. This isn’t surprising; the girls attend private school in Chicago and Barack Obama himself was educated at Hawaii’s most exclusive private school. But hats off to Democrats for Education Reform for keeping the education conversation where it belongs -- on the school choices typical families face:

As parents who have selected public charter schools (and other schools of choice) for our own children, we understand the importance of having excellent educational options. We encourage you to include public charter schools in your school shopping list. More importantly, however, we encourage you to remember that all parents should be able to make these kinds of crucial, life-changing decisions on behalf of their children. And they should do so with as many excellent options in front of them as we can possibly provide.

On a related note, the group, which approaches choice-based education reform with the needs of the Democratic coalition in mind, has floated Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp and Chicago schools superintendent Arne Duncan as their picks for secretary of education, GothamSchools reported. New York’s Joel Klein and Washington’s Michelle Rhee, who have waged protracted battles with teachers’ unions, are too controversial, DFER concedes.

--Dana Goldstein

One interesting post-election development are predictions from the right that President Obama and his allies in Congress will seek to reassert the Fairness Doctrine, a long-lapsed federal regulation mandating equal time for opposing political views on broadcasts. Rush Limbaugh especially promoted the idea, but The Wall Street Journal, George Will, and Michael Gerson all jumped on the train as well.

The problem, of course, is that most folks on the left could care less about the Fairness Doctrine and don't see bringing it back as necessary or important, as The Los Angeles Times chronicles. But, obviously, a good number of conservatives are worked up about this fake issue. Which is weird, but also got me to thinking: Are liberals worked up about a similarly fake conservative project? I e-mailed some conservative writers to get their thoughts on that issue, and so here is James Poulos of Culture11 in reply:

It's funny -- in thinking through your question I found myself recalling a series of "conservative projects" that don't really exist because liberals defeated them or they ran out of steam. Abolishing the Department of Education, banning flag-burning by Constitutional Amendment -- liberals can rest easy as far as these former lodestars of conservative activism are concerned.

But I suppose I have a less controversial and a more controversial answer for you. The less controversial answer is that doesn't seem right to me to claim that conservatives are out to destroy the unions. In the latest example, when conservatives criticize the proposed bailout of the Big 3 automakers, they're not doing so as part of their longstanding vendetta against those horrible unions. And when conservatives advocate vouchers, their arguments in favor of school choice are typically not a scrim designed to destroy the teachers' unions. Not that there aren't bad things to say about some of the consequences of unions, of course; but it strikes me as off the mark to imagine that union-annihilation is a "conservative project."

The more controversial answer is that I don't think "overturning Roe vs. Wade" really accurately describes "a conservative project" anymore. Even though it's just a plurality opinion, Planned Parenthood v. Casey itself superceded Roe and is a much worse decision from a conservative standpoint. (Just read Scalia's eyelash-searing dissent!) And though some conservatives at the grassroots level surely do think in explicitly anti-Roe terms, it strikes me that an increasing number of conservatives would be willing to let Roe go un-overturned so long as progress was made and permitted on late-term abortion, parental notification, and the broadest-possible interpretation of health-of-the-mother provisions (upon which John McCain tried so unsuccessfully to cast a fleeting debate aspersion). Yes, I might go so far as to say that "outlawing abortion" nationwide is not a "conservative project," indeed if it ever was.

Of course none of this means there aren't some conservatives who would prefer a world in which there were no unions and no abortions...just as presumably there are some liberals who really do prefer the fairness doctrine.

Interesting stuff, if a bit, hmm, hopeful? The two main issues Poulos' refers to -- opposition to abortion, and to a slightly lesser extent, labor -- are in my view, at least, key components of the American conservative coalition. It almost seems like Poulos is envisioning a future conservatism that strikes me as being much more electorally effective than the current iteration. But let's consider the ideas.

Admittedly, I was always surprised to hear McCain speak favorably of unions during the presidential campaign, and we shouldn't forget that Republican first-dude-in-waiting Todd Palin is a union member. There certainly have been instances in recent years of unions endorsing Republicans when Democrats were insufficiently enthusiastic about various labor proposals. For the two examples Poulos gives, I'd concede that conservatives have bigger motivations than labor and they're generally interested, respectively, in keeping government out of the market, on one side, and creating an education market, on the other.

The argument seems to me to represent a kind of conservative concession: Labor unions, like the welfare state, are here to stay, and though it seems to me that conservatives are by default in favor of "the right to work" (and laissez faire) most conservatives today are willing to compromise on the issue in different ways. On issues that are mainly about unions, like the Employee Free Choice Act (which allows for card check organizing and is supported by the unions), conservatives cast their opposition as protecting the worker's right to a secret ballot. But it's still an anti-union policy.

On the abortion front, I'd like to hope that Poulos' interpretation is right, though I'm not sure where this country's conservative coalition would be without a strong anti-abortion component. The Doug Kmiecs of the world give progressives (and Poulos*) hope, and the Ross Douthats take it away.

Thanks to James for participating in this little experiment. I've contacted several other writers for their perspectives on this topic, and if any of them reply, I'll post them.

--Tim Fernholz

*Poulos writes to note that his main point is that conservatives are focused on limiting "abortion on demand," rather than making abortion illegal. Thus, he is not given hope by Kmiec or dismayed by Douthat.

First, Mark Schmitt explained Barack Obama's theory of change:

But let's take a slightly different angle on the charge that Obama is "naïve" about power and partisanship. Suppose you were as non-naïve about it as I am -- but your job wasn't writing about politics, it was running for president? What should you do? In that case, your responsibility is not merely to describe the situation exactly, but to find a way to subvert it. In other words, perhaps we are being too literal in believing that "hope" and bipartisanship are things that Obama naively believes are present and possible, when in fact they are a tactic, a method of subverting and breaking the unified conservative power structure. Claiming the mantle of bipartisanship and national unity, and defining the problem to be solved (e.g. universal health care) puts one in a position of strength, and Republicans would defect from that position at their own risk. The public, and younger voters in particular, seem to want an end to partisanship and conflictual politics, and an administration that came in with that premise (an option not available to Senator Clinton), would have a tremendous advantage, at least for a moment.

Then Dana and Ezra showed what change meant for how Obama organized his campaign and his party (and now his administration):

Though Obama himself is a newcomer to Washington, the upper echelons of his Senate and campaign staff are populated almost exclusively by experienced Democratic Party operatives. Continuity with the established party infrastructure is a defining characteristic of the Obama campaign. When Hillary Clinton conceded the nomination, Obama's first major staff change was not the incorporation of a former Clinton operative meant to heal the divisions of the primary, nor the elevation of a national-security graybeard meant to reassure general-election voters of Obama's commander-in-chief credentials. Rather, it was to install Paul Tewes, the skilled organizer who served as the architect of Obama's crucial victory in Iowa, at the DNC to head up the committee's election-year efforts. A few weeks later, it was announced that the DNC would cease accepting contributions from lobbyists or political action committees.

And, in a new piece from our forthcoming piece issue, Mark argues that the patience and coalition building that defined Obama's campaign shows how he will effect change and redefine our politics:

As the old assumptions crumble, the challenge for Obama is not just to pass legislation but to build the foundations of a new vision that is large enough to meet the new era, and bring not just political success, but, like FDR's and Reagan's long eras, the kind of consensus that lives through 30 years of Democratic and Republican administrations alike. (Or perhaps some new party yet unknown.) That's not the work of 100 days. It's not something that can be done with use of raw executive power and a congressional super-majority. It's a matter of organizing, education, and redefining the questions.

--The Editors

Newsweek is giving some real space to the cranks this time around, with Lisa Miller seriously considering the evidence that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ. Miller notes that Raptureready website founder Todd Strindberg has been getting a lot of emails lately, including one that notes that "one of the winning lottery numbers in the president-elect's home state was 666." Miller continues: 

"A number of folks have e-mailed me saying, "Clinton is Satan's pet." I came across information posted in newsgroups and websites that add up William Jefferson Clinton numerologically to total 666." 

Almost immediately after Election Day, defeated members of Congress are moved from their cushy offices into basement cubicles and offered "resume writing and retirement planning seminars -- even therapy sessions, if needed," reports Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones.

You'd think if you could get yourself into the U.S. Congress, you'd know how to update your resume. Sad.

--Dana Goldstein

Congressional Democrats have decided not to offer a major stimulus package during the lame duck session, instead waiting for the forthcoming Obama administration and larger majorities in both houses. They're concerned about obstruction from Senate Republicans and a presidential veto, but also about troubles in their own caucus around the idea of supporting another expensive economic measure, especially one linked to the somewhat controversial plan to bail out the auto industry, which, along with unemployment insurance extensions, now makes up the entire 'early' stimulus bill. This morning I spoke with Rob Shapiro, an economist and former Clinton administration treasury official, about the stimulus bill and the proposed bailout.

The idea that the Democrats and the administration are willing to put off serious stimulus until after the election is a very troubling mistake. ... Delaying the stimulus makes no economic sense. Why the Bush administration and the Republicans want to go out this year with a last measure that will damage the economy is beyond me. There's a big difference between getting it out in the middle of November and having to wait two and a half more months in an economy that's declining fast and is subject to additional shocks.

And on the Detroit bailout:

[T]he problems in the auto industry, the auto industry brought upon itself. The crisis in the auto industry is created by the financial crisis. If we let the auto industry go down, it will return the favor and make the financial crisis worse, and make the overall economic crisis worse. We have no more choice with the auto industry than with the financial institutions. That doesn't mean that you suspend thought about how to go about it … Detroit has a couple problems. One is, an absence of consumer demand. Well, there's an absence in consumer demand for everything. Consumer demand is falling at a faster rate than any time in 75 years. Jeff Sachs got half of it right. He said Detroit doesn't need a shake-up, it needs a technological breakthroughs. No, it needs both. The assistance should in part be tied to a greater commitment to move toward a super-high mileage car.

I consider this kind of a bridge loan, obviously tax payers should get equity, obviously they should get board seats. To help deal with the debt, we should do what we should have done with financial institutions which is to jawbone, get equity swaps between the auto companies and their lenders. They need to give up some of their equity to their lenders in turn for debt relief. And that will make them more attractive for outside investors, white knights, or grey knights.

You don't bail out the industry for the industry's sake. You bail out the industry for the country's sake. If this had happened three years ago, I would have opposed it. But you cannot ignore the conditions.

It's possible that public opinion could help sway Bush and Senate Republicans toward stimulus -- is it too early to try to engage the coalition of Obama supporters in contacting Congress and the president? Probably, especially given the one president at a time problem. But waiting on stimulus is a recipe for letting the recession lengthen.

--Tim Fernholz

In an article from our forthcoming print issue Mark Schmitt explains how patience won Obama the presidency:

A single tactical choice early in Barack Obama's quest for the presidency set the course for all the events that followed -- Obama's securing of the Democratic nomination and surprisingly smooth path to resounding victory in the general election. After Sen. Hillary Clinton defeated him in the New Hampshire primary, rather than pouring resources into the very next primary states, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe looked weeks into the future. He deployed staff to states that wouldn't vote for another month and implemented a long, patient strategy of assembling a majority of delegates, one at a time, in friendly and unfriendly states alike.

And Kevin Connor and Matthew Skomarovsky explore how Larry Summers helped set the groundwork for the housing bubble:

Summers' encouragement of ill-fated asset bubbles was a second major policy failure with direct bearing on the current crisis. At the Clinton Treasury, he pursued a policy of strong support for the overvalued dollar and the rising stock market, remained silent about the downside risks, and made no attempt to rein in the speculative stampede. The subsequent collapse of the dot-com economy was largely a result of these failures.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan are both concerned about John Brennan, the Obama adviser quoted in that CQ article because he seems to have been a supporter of torture in the past. At the very least, Brennan has defended both "enhanced interrogation" and "extraordinary rendition" (sample quote from Greenwald: "There [has] been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives.") Yet speaking in his capacity as an adviser for Obama, he said that Obama “[believes] torture [should] not be allowed in any form or fashion in any part of the federal government, and he would make sure that was the case. ... Whether the Army field manual is comprehensive enough to cover all those tactics and techniques, that’s something I think he’d look to his national security advisers for."

This is why I wasn't completely mollified by Obama's statement on 60 Minutes. Hopefully Brennan's position on such matters has come to match Obama's, and his statement to CQ wasn't an instance of self-serving doublespeak, because Marc Ambinder reports that Brennan is a candidate to be the next director of the CIA. Part of the reason why torture still occurred even after the changes in the Army Field Manual is because the CIA wasn't forced to comply with those regulations. The problem isn't whether Army Field Manual isn't comprehensive, but rather that other parts of our intelligence apparatus are entitled to ignore it, and Brennan's above statement avoided taking a clear position on whether Obama would compel the CIA to adhere to those standards. The pertinent question, both to Brennan and Obama, is whether they would support legislation designed to do just that.

If Brennan remains a supporter of torture and extraordinary rendition, giving him such a position would say more about Obama's intentions on the subject than any number of interviews with the media.

--A. Serwer

Today's New York Times story on the troubles at National Review is worth a read, though I actually agree with The Corner's John J. Miller that it's ridiculous to chalk the magazine's problems up to the "coarseness" of Internet debate. Rather, it seems pretty clear that NR's loss of talent, including Christopher Buckley and David Frum, is due to ideological rigidity. It's hard to be an "intellectual" magazine when you wholeheartedly embrace the Bush-Palin brand of conservatism, in which reading, writing, and speaking coherently are slurred as "elitist."

It's sad, because The Corner, for all it rankles, has always been the model of a blog that fosters debate among its contributors. As an employee of a small ideological magazine, I sincerely hope NR pulls itself together, abandons its knee-jerk hostility toward racial and ethnic difference, and becomes a voice of intelligent opposition. The web needs more informed and intelligent policy debate.

--Dana Goldstein

I certainly respect E.J. Dionne far more than I do Will Saletan. But it must be said that his new column has a pretty strong whiff of the "originating policies pro-choicers have been advocating for many decades" routine that Saletan has patented. Apparently, the solution to ending the conflict over abortion includes "contraception programs, even if these are a sticking point for some social conservatives, along with 'programs that are going to encourage women to bring their children to term.' Among them: expanded health coverage for women and children, more child care, adoption help, and income support for the working poor." Since pro-choice liberals have pretty much always supported these policies and they don't seem to stop the anti-choice minority from supporting criminalization (as well as opposing most or all of these programs, almost as if reducing abortion rates isn't a terribly important goal for American "pro-lifers"), it's not clear what's actually supposed to change about the abortion politics here.

Of course, if a fine old wine can broaden the coalition for reproductive freedom if we dust off the bottles with some rhetoric that appeals to some members of the softer side, what's the harm? Well, I worry about defending good policies with such justifications as "encouraging women to bring more pregnancies to term," justifications that can pretty quickly end up in arguments for burdensome abortion regulations. But the real problem with Dionne's argument is his apparent belief that enacting this (as stated) worthwhile program would somehow "make cultural warfare a quaint relic of the past." This won't happen, simply because anti-abortion politics tends to be bundled up with an array of other reactionary attitudes about women and sexuality that undercut support for other policies that will reduce abortion rates. Some examples from Margaret Tabot's superb new article:

But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their "sexual début"--to use the festive term of social-science researchers--shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement's warnings that condoms won't actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

A few important posts were filled over the weekend, and I owe you some commentary. Why no contemporaneous punditry? You obviously haven't put Ikea furniture together lately.

• Senior Adviser: Pete Rouse. Rouse was, as you probably know, Tom Daschle's chief of staff in the Senate before becoming Obama's top Senate aide. He's a hill creature, savvy about legislation, and was one of Obama's earliest presidential advisers.
• Deputy Chief of Staff: Jim Messina. Interested in health care reform? Be interested in Messina, whose past work for Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus makes him an ideal go-between for a future health care reform bill that will go through the Montana senator's committee.
• Deputy Chief of Staff: Mona Sutphen. A former Foreign Service Officer who served on the Clinton National Security Council, Sutphen's portfolio will presumably include a heavy dose of foreign affairs. Matt offers further background.
• Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Relations and Public Liaison: Valerie Jarrett. The only question was where, not whether. Expect Jarrett to be a confidant-in-chief and advisor without portfolio.
• Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs: Phil Schiliro: Also more or less a fait accompli since he began heading legislative affairs for the transition. Another congressional import, Schiliro was Congressman Henry Waxman's long-serving chief of staff.
• Chief of Staff to the Vice President: Ron Klain: We've already discussed this fellow.
• White House Counsel: Greg Craig. It hasn't been announced yet, but it's been reported out pretty extensively. Craig, who everyone was expecting for a national security job, finds himself once again the president's lawyer (he represented President Bill Clinton during the travails of impeachment). Craig's background in national security will serve him well as president-elect Obama negotiates the tricky legal issues surrounding the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison facility.
  

As promised, we're seeing the White House staff develop much more quickly than the various executive agencies.

-- Tim Fernholz

In the worst days of the Iraq War, the Pentagon launched a media campaign designed to convince the world that Iran was smuggling arms to Iraqi insurgents. Some of the claims strained credulity, such as the idea that Iran would supply Sunni insurgents fighting against its Shia allies. In particular, Iran was supposed to be the main supplier of deadly EFPs, or explosively formed projectiles. To some, these claims were alarming evidence of malevolent Iranian intentions. To others, they were a transparent effort to blame US failure on Iran.

Turns out that the latter were right:

The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi'a militia caches during that period.

The extremely small proportion of Iranian arms in Shi'a militia weapons caches further suggests that Shi'a militia fighters in Iraq had been getting weapons from local and international arms markets rather than from an official Iranian-sponsored smuggling network.

Left out of the list of Iranian-made weaponry were 350 armour-piercing explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) found in Iraqi weapons caches. Despite the lurid claims of US officials, the task group couldn't ascribe an Iranian origin to a single one...Iranian equipment is less reliable and more expensive than Eastern Block materiel that flooded the region after the 2003 invasion -something which a certain imprisoned international arms dealer, ex-CIA and ex-US military contractor and supplier to despots and terrorists, Viktor
Bout, may well know a fair bit about. It's a buyer's market and the Iranians are seeing market forces exclude their produce, with the exception of simple artillery rockets. They're more expensive than the Pakistani arms bazaar's copies coming down the old Silk Road routes and far less effective than easily available and comparatively-priced black market US weapons too.

When I think of Christmas, this image of a product John Aravosis found being sold by the Christian right American Family Association is not the one that comes to mind. You'll remember the AFA from such moments of intolerance as attacking Keith Ellison for being a Muslim and seeing a "secret gay agenda" in, well, everything. Throw in a little anti-Semitism there too while you're at it. In any case, this is the look they're going for this holiday season:

Product description:

Looking for an effective way to express your Christian faith this Christmas season to honor our Lord Jesus? Now you can.... with the "Original Christmas Cross" yard decoration.

Yeah I guess nothing's more "original" than that.

Look, my advice is not to put a burning cross on your porch as a Christmas decoration. But hey, I'm Jewish, so what do I know from Christmas?

--A. Serwer

There's a lot of good stuff in this 60 Minutes interview with Barack and Michelle Obama on their family's personal transition to the White House. Michelle signaled that she and her husband are interested in Washington, D.C. school reform, even though they likely won't be sending their daughters to public school. Barack Obama has called Michelle Rhee, the controversial D.C. superintendent, "wonderful." The latest news on Rhee is that she is pursuing a variety of means to strip power from the D.C. teachers union, including potentially asking the federal government to declare the city's school system in a "state of emergency," which would mean administration wouldn't have to negotiate with the union. Difficult stuff for a Democratic president or his wife to get involved in. But here's what Michelle had to say about education in D.C:

Michelle Obama: ...I'm interested in education. Both Barack and I believe we can have an impact in the immediate D.C. area, in terms of making sure we're contributing to the community that we immediately live in -- that's always been something that we try to do whether it's in our own neighborhoods or the schools that we've attended. So there's plenty to do.

Steve Kroft: Have you seriously considered sending the girls to public school?

Michelle Obama: You know, we're still in the process of figuring out that transition, and what we have asked people to understand is that the decision we have made will be based on the best interests of the girls. We haven't made that decision yet. We want that to be a personal process. And people have been really good about considering that.

--Dana Goldstein

Last week, there was one article in The Wall Street Journal that named a single source suggesting Obama would be open to continuing Bush "enhanced interrogation" policies. Right wing blogs, desperate for vindication on this issue, cited the WSJ report, or reports citing the WSJ report, and ignored contradicting stories printed in Salon and The Washington Post. (Civil liberties advocates like Glenn Greenwald were also concerned about the WSJ article, but for obviously different reasons.) Ed Morrisey concluded:

If Obama now agrees with McCain on this issue, that’s an improvement — but will the press treat Obama like they treated McCain? Will they start talking about him as though he was the reincarnation of the Marquis de Sade and Vidkun Quisling rolled up into one person? The MoveOn/Code Pink fringe certainly will, especially after his reversal on FISA reform this summer, on which the media largely gave him a pass.

I suspect they will give him a pass on this occasion, too. And that will speak volumes about their dishonest and vitriolic attacks on McCain in February, smearing his honor for partisan political purposes.

Sure, we're talking about torture here -- but Morrisey's having a partisan pity party over whether or not the media will give Obama a "pass" on the issue. Meanwhile the very same article Morrisey cites contains a quote from non-anonymous Obama adviser John Brennan saying “[Obama] [believes] torture not be allowed in any form or fashion in any part of the federal government, and he would make sure that was the case,” and “whether the Army field manual is comprehensive enough to cover all those tactics and techniques, that’s something I think he’d look to his national security advisers for,” but Morrisey gives more weight to "media reports" that "have raised questions." He ignores entirely any information in the article that suggests Obama might not actually be coming around to the Republican position on torture, for the purpose of arguing that the press treats conservatives unfairly. 

If the WSJ report is correct, and Obama won't overhaul said policies, it's not an "improvement," it's a serious blow to our international credibility. It would completely destroy our ability to try GITMO detainees in any non-kangaroo court system, and it would mean that we would continue to rely on compromised intelligence. But it's not surprising to see people who support torture as policy hoping that Obama would come around to their point of view, nor is it surprising to watch them ignore reports the contrary -- they're so desperate for peer and authoritative validation of what is an unquestionably immoral act that they'll cling to any news that contains that possibility. Even if Obama did support torture, that wouldn't be any kind of vindication -- it would simply mean that he is possessing of the same kind of twisted reasoning as so many others in Washington. It wouldn't reflect well on supporters of torture -- nothing can do that -- it would simply make Obama a hypocrite.

Meanwhile, on 60 Minutes, Obama told Steve Kroft:

I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture. And I'm gonna make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world.

Now we've heard "we don't torture" from the man currently in office. So this isn't a matter of trust, it's a matter of accountability. This isn't a matter of just saying "we don't torture" as Bush has done so many times before, it's about Obama actually doing something once he gets in office to make sure it doesn't continue to happen. Certainly if Obama wants to close GITMO and try detainees in the civilian court system, he can't actually make use of evidence obtained through torture.

It's worth maintaining a healthy skepticism of Obama's intentions until he is able to act decisively on the subject, but given the circumstances, the public pronouncements, and the reporting done by everyone except the WSJ, I'm feeling a cautious optimism about Obama's intentions to end Bush Administration policy on torture once he takes office.

--A. Serwer

• Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State? She's not denying it, but she isn't confirming it either. Dana takes a look at the pros of the selection, while First Read chalks the chatter up to political maneuvering by the Obama camp: "Just ask George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter what it was like to have a once or future presidential rival in the Senate serving as a one-person Roman tribunal. Remember how easily the press gravitated to John McCain in '01 or Bob Kerrey in '93 or Ted Kennedy in '77 to allow them to be one-senator judge/juries on Administration proposals? The upside for Obama putting Clinton at State (or even the Pentagon) is that it gets her out of the Senate and gets her out of the domestic policy debates." Also, who would get Clinton's Senate seat in the event of a promotion?
• Obama will meet with McCain on Monday to discuss issues the two men can work together and find common ground on, potentially giving McCain a leadership role on energy, budget reform, Social Security changes, earmark reform and immigration. Or maybe Obama wants to give him a cabinet position! Seriously though, hasn't this become the dominant post-election storyline -- Obama meets with someone and that person is instantly rumored to be "in contention" for this or that position within the administration?
  
• Michael Steele formally announces his intention to run for RNC chair and should be considered a front runner. Marc Ambinder describes him as "formidable," and says that he is "more popular among Republicans generally than among the Republicans on the Republican National Committee, even though he has more allies on that committee than some of his opponents would like to believe."
• Patrick Leahy has become the first Senate Democrat to publicly come out against keeping Joe Lieberman as chair of the Homeland Security committee. Of course, Leahy also had the guts to stand up to The Joker, so by comparison Lieberman's small potatoes.
• Things are looking good for Mark Begich in Alaska's still-uncalled Senate race, according to The Anchorage Daily News: "A Daily News analysis, based on data provided by the state Division of Elections, shows that 56 percent of those ballots come from districts that favored Begich on Nov. 4."
• Barack Obama's weekly radio address will now be simultaneously broadcast as a YouTube video.
• California Republican Rep. Dan Lungren is mounting a leadership challenge against House Minority Leader John Boehner, whose inspired leadership has resulted in his party losing over 50 seats in the last two elections. Unsurprisingly, the new (potential) House leadership is far more right-wing than the current leaders. Gotta love that big tent GOP!

--Mori Dinauer

Adam Serwer explains how Tom Perriello beat Virgil Goode in Virginia's 5th Congressional District:

Even in a rough year for Republicans, most political observers still didn't give do-gooder Tom Perriello much of a chance against Virginia's Republican congressman Virgil Goode. Virginia's 5th Congressional District, situated in the middle of the state, is a deep pool of red in a state trending blue due to the steady influx of minorities and young professionals.

Gershom Gorenberg argues that Obama should make Israeli-Palestinian peace one of his first priorities:

Barack Obama will inherit this mess, along with all the others. Very soon, he must decide how quickly to throw his weight behind Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, what to aim for, and how to succeed where so many others have failed.

The answer: Move fast, very fast. Ignore all advice from old diplomatic hands who'll tell you to avoid big, difficult issues and to stick to crisis management and interim accords. Seek a full end-of-conflict agreement. And apply lessons from your electoral campaign: Enforce absolute message discipline in your own team, and employ dramatic public events and rhetoric to restore people's belief that change is possible.

Robert Kuttner explains how a stimulus package could break through congressional deadlock and be passed in the lame-duck session of Congress:

Watching the economy unravel while the government dithers is like viewing an accident in slow motion. Or to change the metaphor, it is like one of those movies where the film begins with the tragic ending and the rest of the movie recounts the unfolding back story.

And Terry Samuel reports on hopeful signs for Obama's relationship with Congress:

More than anything else, Barack Obama will need grownups to help him govern the country. He is in a position to choose some of them with Cabinet picks and Executive Office staff, but he is constitutionally bound to work with the Congress, which is not a target-rich environment in the area of maturity and reasonableness. But there are some hopeful signs.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published.

--The Editors

There were a lot of problems with mistaken identity with my last post, so I just want to clear a few things up.

This is Hoover Fellow Shelby Steele:

This is former Maryland Lt. Governor and RNC Chair contender Michael Steele:

This is Civil War Scholar Shelby Foote:

Any questions?

--A. Serwer

Redstate and company might need to add a few names to that "Operation Leper" list, now that the Republican Governor's Association has snubbed Sarah Palin:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford was voted RGA chairman, taking over the top job from Texas Gov. Rick Perry who will now serve as finance chairman. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is vice-chairman, while Florida Gov. Charlie Crist will serve as chair for the annual RGA gala, and Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue will head up the recruitment effort.

Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle, Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will also sit on the RGA’s executive committee.

“Republican Governors are natural leaders who will find solutions to our nation’s challenges and bring back the Party,” Sanford said in a statement.

Not on the list? Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who also attended the Miami meeting.

The choice of Palin was made for transparently political reasons, undermined somewhat by her lack of qualifications but mostly by her manifest ignorance about issues facing the country. High profile Republicans went along with the farce because they were trying to win an election. Now that it's over, their contempt for her is showing.

What's bizarre is that the base seems to have genuinely believed that Palin was smart, well-informed, and came off like someone who was ready to be president. They were such true believers that they're still enthusiastic about her, long after the leaders of their party have stopped pretending. Even though the corpse is dead, the legs are still twitching.

--A. Serwer